Supplication for All Saints, and You Are One of Them

I know a woman who has prayed for other people's struggles for twenty-two years and has never once told anybody about her own.

She is not secretive and she is not proud. If you were in trouble she would be the first person you would call, and she would pray about it properly, and she would still be praying about it a year later without being reminded.

And she has one thing. Everybody who knows her would guess that she does, because everybody has one. And in twenty-two years of being in rooms with people who would have carried it gladly, nobody has ever been told.

I asked her about it once and she gave me an answer that I have heard, almost word for word, from a lot of people.

She said: I would have to explain it.

That is what stops most people. Not shame exactly. The prospect of the explanation. The whole history, the background, the part that makes it make sense, and the thought of assembling all of that in front of somebody at the end of a long day is enough to keep a thing unsaid for two decades.

Who is on that list

At the end of the passage about the armor, after all the equipment, Paul says something that people treat as a closing formality and that is not one.

Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints. (Ephesians 6:18, King James Version)

For all saints. That is the category, and it is not a narrow one, and there is no clause excluding the ones who are usually doing the praying.

Which means the woman I described is on that list. She has been carrying everybody on it for twenty-two years and has never once let anybody know that her name belongs there too.

You are on that list, and there is no exemption in the verse for people who are usually the ones praying (Ephesians 6:18). The Spirit is the one who puts a person's own name back into a category they had quietly removed it from.

Somebody has to hold the arms up

There is a scene in Exodus that says this more plainly than any teaching about it ever has.

Moses is on a hill with his hands up while a battle goes on below, and while his hands are up things go one way and when they come down things go the other. And then he gets tired, because he is a man.

But Moses' hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side. (Exodus 17:12)

Two men, one on each side, holding up the arms of the person everybody was depending on.

That is a picture of the most spiritually significant man in the account being physically unable to do the thing on his own, and it is recorded without any embarrassment at all.

You are allowed to have arms that get heavy, and the account puts a stone under the man and two people beside him without one word of criticism (Exodus 17:12), and it is His Spirit who arranges an Aaron and a Hur long before somebody is willing to let them near.

And notice what the two of them do not do. They do not take over. They do not ask for the full history of the battle. They stand on either side and hold up two arms, which is a very small job.

You do not have to explain it

Here is the practical part, and it is the thing that unlocked it for the woman I described.

You are not required to give the history, and nobody in Scripture is described as delivering a briefing before being prayed for (Galatians 6:2), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who makes a short unexplained sentence land properly on the person who hears it.

There is a version of asking for prayer that involves a full account, and that version is exhausting and it is also completely optional.

The sentence can be as short as this: there is something I have never asked anybody to pray about, and I am asking now, and I am not going to explain it.

That is a complete request. A person who cannot receive that is not the right person, and a person who can will not push.

You are permitted to ask without explaining, and the arrangement in that passage is about carrying rather than about information (Galatians 6:2). That work is the Spirit's, and He makes an unexplained request land properly on somebody who was never told the details.

And there is a promise attached to two people that has nothing to do with how much either of them knows.

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. (Matthew 18:20)

In my name. Not in full possession of the facts.

And this belongs here plainly, in every article in this category. Where the thing that has never been named is genuinely dangerous, to the person carrying it or to anybody else, then a friend is not the only one to tell. Tell a doctor, a counselor, a sponsor, a pastor you trust, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.