Lord, I Believe; Help Thou Mine Unbelief

A woman told me she has prayed the same prayer about her son every day for ten years and does not believe it anymore, and she said it as a confession.

She expected me to correct her.

What she actually said was: I keep saying the words and I do not think anything is going to happen, and I do not know whether that means I should stop.

I have thought about the courage in that sentence a great deal since. She was not asking permission to stop. She was asking whether she was allowed to keep going in the condition she is actually in, which is a different and much harder question.

And there is one man in the Gospels who says the same thing she said, in six words, out loud, in front of a crowd, and Jesus does not correct him.

Where that father was standing

The man in Mark nine is not a bystander asking a theoretical question. He has a son who has been in danger since childhood, and he says so with a detail that is hard to read.

And ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him: but if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us. (Mark 9:22, King James Version)

If thou canst do any thing. That is a man who has already been let down.

He is not being disrespectful. He has been to the disciples, who could not do it, and he has presumably been to everybody else first, and the if in that sentence is the residue of a decade of disappointments.

And then Jesus says something back to him about believing, and the father answers with the sentence.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. (Mark 9:24)

Both halves. He does not choose. He says that he believes, and then in the same breath he says he does not, and he does not attempt to reconcile the two things.

You are permitted to say both halves in one sentence, and the man who did it got what he came for (Mark 9:24), and it is the Spirit who makes an honest contradiction sayable in front of God rather than requiring a person to sort themselves out first.

What Jesus does not do

I want to point at the silences, because they are the teaching.

He does not correct the man's theology.

He does not tell him to come back when he has resolved the second half of his sentence.

He does not make the outcome conditional on the father producing a better state of mind, and He does not comment on the state of mind at all.

He acts.

That is worth sitting with for anybody who has spent ten years suspecting that their own praying is invalidated by the condition they are praying it in. The one man in the Gospels who says out loud that his belief is broken is the man whose request is answered in the next paragraph.

You are not disqualified by the condition you are praying in, and the father in that account was not asked to fix anything before it was done (Mark 9:22), and the Spirit is the one who applies that to somebody who has been quietly assuming otherwise for a decade.

The honest thing about long prayers

Now let me say the hard part, because I am not going to write an article about a ten year prayer and pretend it always ends the way that one did.

The father in Mark nine got an answer that day. A great many people do not, and I have sat with them, and I am not going to hand anybody a reason God has not given for why one and not another. Where Scripture is silent about that, I am silent, and anybody who explains it to you has invented the explanation.

What I will say is that the passage settles one thing and only one, and it happens to be the thing that woman was actually asking about.

It settles whether a person in her condition is allowed to keep praying.

You are allowed to keep praying in the condition you are actually in, and that is what the account settles rather than anything about outcomes (Mark 9:24). The Spirit is the one who makes a settled permission land on somebody who has been asking for one silently.

And this belongs here plainly, because this category reaches people in real danger. Where the situation being prayed about is dangerous right now, for the person loved or for the one praying, that is not for an article to hold. Tell somebody today: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.

For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4:15)

Touched with the feeling. Not informed about it. That is a description of somebody who knows what a decade does to a person from the inside.

You are heard by somebody who is touched with the feeling of your infirmities rather than merely informed of them (Hebrews 4:15), and it is His Spirit who makes that a nearness rather than a doctrine.