I sat on a step with a man of forty-four who had not been back to his town in nineteen years, and he told me a thing that surprised us both.
He was not bitter. That is the first thing to say. He had left because there was no work and no future in it and one or two people he did not want to run into, and he had built a good life somewhere else and he was not sorry.
We were talking about something else entirely when he said: I have never prayed for that town. Not once. And I have prayed for places I have never been.
Then he sat with it. And he said the second half, which is the part I keep. He said: I did not decide not to. I think I just took it off the list when I took myself off it.
That is a common thing and I have almost never heard it spoken out loud. A person leaves, and a whole place quietly leaves their praying with them, and it is not resentment and it is not indifference. It is more like the place got filed under a closed chapter.
He was doing well and the news still reached him
Nehemiah has a good job. He is cupbearer to a king, which is close to the center of power in the world of the time, and he is a long way from where his people came from.
His brother comes through with news, and Nehemiah asks a question that people who have left do not always ask.
He asks about the ones who are still there.
Then this happens.
And it came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of heaven. (Nehemiah 1:4)
Sat down and wept. Not about his own circumstances, which were excellent. About a place he was not living in.
And when the king finally asks him what is wrong, the answer he gives is a sentence about geography.
Why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers' sepulchres, lieth waste, and the gates thereof are consumed with fire? (Nehemiah 2:3, King James Version)
The place of my fathers. That is what he calls it. Not my city, because he had never lived there. A place he was connected to by descent and by nothing else at all.
You are connected to a place by more than where you currently sleep, and the connection was not dissolved by your leaving, and Nehemiah 2 has a man in a palace calling a ruin the place of his fathers, and the Spirit is the one who keeps a tie alive that a person had reasonably assumed was cut.
Leaving was allowed, and it is not the subject
I want to be very clear about something, because articles on this subject often smuggle in a rebuke.
Leaving a place is allowed. Sometimes leaving is the wisest and most obedient thing a person ever does. There is no verse anywhere that makes staying holier, and the man on the step had good reasons and does not owe anybody an explanation for any of them.
So nothing here is asking anybody to go back, or to feel warm about a place that was hard, or to reinterpret their own history into something nicer than it was.
The only thing on the table is a sentence.
You have been carrying an unspoken sense that you owe that place something, and one sentence is the whole of what is being asked (Nehemiah 2:3), and the Spirit is the one who takes a debt a person cannot name and settles it with something small.
You have permission to pray for a place without being called back to it, and Nehemiah prayed for months before he ever went (Nehemiah 1:4), and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates an intercession from an obligation, which a person's own conscience is bad at doing.
And Jeremiah writes the widest version of it, to people who had every reason to hate where they were.
And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it. (Jeremiah 29:7)
If that instruction covers a city people were dragged to against their will, it covers the town somebody was glad to get out of.
Who is left
Here is the thing that got the man on the step, and it will probably get you too, so I will say it plainly.
The people who left are not the ones the prayer is for.
Somebody is still there. Somebody is nineteen and looking at the same lack of work you looked at. Somebody is running the store your family used to go to. Somebody is in the house you grew up in and has no idea you ever existed. And there is almost certainly an older person there who is the last of something.
None of them left. And a whole generation of people who did leave took their praying with them, which means a lot of small places are being prayed for by almost nobody.
You are one of very few people in a position to name that place at all, and being one of the few is what makes this yours rather than optional (Jeremiah 29:7). The Spirit is the one who puts a place back into somebody's mouth after nineteen years of silence.
The psalmist in exile makes himself a promise about this, and the wording is severe.
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. (Psalm 137:5)
That is a man far away, with no prospect of return, refusing to let a place drop out of his memory. He is not planning a journey. He is refusing an amnesia.
So say the name out loud, and pray one sentence for whoever is still there.
You have a tie to that ground that He did not dissolve when you drove out of it, and Nehemiah called a place he had never lived the place of his fathers (Nehemiah 2:3), and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that tie warm rather than a person having to manufacture sentiment about a hard town.
Now the counterfeit, and here it has a particular sting. It says: you left, so you have no standing to pray for it, and praying for it now is sentimentality after the fact. Learn the shape of that. It is vague, it names you rather than an act, and its only instruction is to keep the silence. Conviction from the Holy Spirit names one specific thing and it never leaves a person without somewhere to go, and the door here is a name and a sentence.
You are not required to have stayed in order to pray, and Jeremiah wrote his instruction to people who had been carried away against their will (Jeremiah 29:7). That work is the Spirit's, and He is present in a place long after everybody who could pray for it has moved.
Nothing here promises that town changes. It may not, and the woman who started at sixty-one says plainly that nothing happened. What is settled is that the tie is real, that leaving never dissolved it, and that a place with nobody praying for it now has one person doing so.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud. Christ is in you, and the right to speak over your own praying came with Him rather than being manufactured. God had a man weep in a palace over a place he had never lived, so speak to the silence that grew around a town when you drove out of it. You carry His word rather than your own opinion, and however He answers, that half belongs to Him.
- Silence I have kept about that town, you are not moving on and you are not the end of the story. The Word of God has a cupbearer in a palace calling a ruin the place of his fathers, and he had never once lived there.
- Voice that says leaving cost me my standing, you are finished in the name of Jesus. Scripture tells people carried away against their will to seek the peace of the city and pray unto the LORD for it.
- Father, Nehemiah 1:4 has a man sitting down and weeping over news from a place he was not living in. I say that name out loud tonight and pray one sentence for whoever is still there, and I thank You that Your Spirit kept the tie I assumed was cut.
Nehemiah 2:3
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