My Grandmother's Prayers Counted And Mine Did Not

In his family, when something serious happened, they went to his grandmother.

Nobody made a rule about it. It was simply understood the way the location of the good knives was understood. If a diagnosis came, if a marriage was in trouble, if somebody was in real danger, you rang her, and she prayed, and the family talked afterward about what had happened as though a line ran from her chair to God and back.

She has been gone eleven years.

And what he has never said out loud, not once, in eleven years, is this: when we lost her we lost the person God listened to. He prays. He prays for the same people. But he has a private conviction that his prayers go up as ordinary post, and hers went by courier, and that the difference was her, and that he has never been anything like her.

It shows in small ways. He prays for his sister and then rings a cousin to ask her to pray as well, because he does not quite trust his own to arrive.

If you have quietly ranked yourself below somebody in your own family, sit down at this table. She is not going to be reduced here, and neither are you.

She was real, and so is the ranking that came after

Let us hold two things at once, because dropping either one makes a mess.

Your grandmother's life with God was real. Decades of it. Whatever she carried was genuine, and I have no interest in flattening a devoted woman into a cautionary tale to make a point about grace.

The ranking, though, is a thing your family built afterward out of grief and admiration, and it has been running quietly ever since, and she is not the one who put it there.

You are not a second class petitioner in your own family. Nothing about who prays has ever changed how God receives what is prayed. I am not saying that to comfort you. The written word says that God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), and the word there means He does not receive faces, does not weigh who is standing in front of Him, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who keeps it true in a man ringing a cousin because he does not trust his own prayer to arrive.

Who the sky opened over

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a way to become more like her.

Look at the men and women heaven opens over in Scripture and try to build a ranking out of them. It cannot be done.

Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.Acts 10:34

Peter says that after a sheet comes down out of an opened heaven, and after a Roman soldier with no religious pedigree at all has been answered. Jacob was a deceiver asleep on a stone. The father in the Gospel says Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief, and gets what he came for.

Not one of those openings was awarded on the strength of the person underneath it.

You are not standing further back than she was. The opening is God's and it always was, and the Word never once ranked the person praying. That is written down and left there deliberately, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a man who has spent eleven years assuming the line to heaven was buried with somebody.

Do not put a new saint in the gap

Something has to fill the space, or by Sunday there will be a new courier. A cousin, a pastor, somebody at church who seems to have a way with these things.

That is the same ranking with a new name in it.

You have direct access, right now, on the same terms as anyone who has ever prayed in this family. Scripture says that through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father (Ephesians 2:18), where the access is one and the Spirit is one and there is no second class listed anywhere in the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who has carried every prayer you have prayed for your sister exactly as He carried hers.

And if these eleven years have cost more than anybody at the table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.