You Cannot Picture Them, and He Still Said Ask

I noticed something about my own praying at a kitchen table with a nine year old, and it has bothered me pleasantly ever since.

We were doing the thing where you go around and everybody says one. She said her friend, and her friend's dog, and her teacher, and then she said a name I did not recognize and I asked who that was.

She said: he is a boy in the news, he was on the television, he had a red coat.

That is all she had. A coat and a country she could not have found on a map. And she prayed for him with the same amount of realness that she prayed for her friend, because in her mind he was a boy with a red coat, and that was enough of a person to talk to God about.

I went back over my own praying that night and found the edge of it, clean as a fence line. I pray for people I can see. Every single one. Wife, family, a handful of names from church, three people whose faces come to me easily.

Not one person on my list is somebody I cannot picture. And nobody had ever told me that this was a limit rather than a principle.

The invitation is embarrassingly large

There is a psalm where God speaks to His Son and makes an offer, and the size of it is uncomfortable.

Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. (Psalm 2:8, King James Version)

Ask of me. The verb is an invitation, and the object of it is everybody.

Now, the psalm is about the Son, and I am not going to pretend otherwise or lift the promise off Him and hand it to a reader as though it were addressed to us. But we are in Him, and we pray in His name, and the prayer He taught us has thy kingdom come in it, which is the same appetite in smaller words.

You have been brought into a family whose appetite runs to the ends of the earth, and the appetite came with the family rather than being something you worked up, and Psalm 2 records the Father proposing the ask rather than waiting to be asked, and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who gives a person a desire the size of a promise.

And the end of the book shows what the answer to that request looks like when it lands.

And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book... for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation. (Revelation 5:9)

Out of every. Not out of many. That is the eventual account, and every one of those names is a person somebody could not picture.

What a face does

Here is the mechanical problem, and it is worth being honest about because it is not a spiritual defect.

A person cannot love a number. That is not cynicism, it is how we are built. Compassion runs along a face and it does not run along a statistic, and every honest person who has tried to pray for four million people has felt their attention slide off within about six seconds.

Watch what the Gospels do with this. They almost never give us a crowd without giving us a look.

But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd. (Matthew 9:36)

He saw. And then the writer tells us what He saw about them: not their number, but their condition. Scattered. No shepherd. He gave the multitude a description, which is what turns a crowd back into people.

You were built to pray along a face, and that is not a flaw to repent of, it is the shape of the thing you were given (Matthew 9:36), and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies a picture where a person has no photograph.

Borrow a coat

So here is the practical part, and I got it from a nine year old and I have never improved on it.

Give the person one detail. That is all. Not an accurate one, necessarily, and not a researched one. One concrete thing that makes them a person rather than a category.

A boy in a red coat. A woman getting off a bus at the end of a shift. A man about my age who has just been told something in a corridor. A grandmother in a kitchen somewhere it is already tomorrow.

The detail is not a claim. Nobody is pretending to know. The detail is a handle, in the same way a name is a handle, and it does the one thing that makes a prayer for a stranger possible, which is to give your attention something to land on.

You have permission to invent a coat, and inventing it is not lying, it is doing for a stranger what your mind does automatically for a friend (Psalm 2:8). That work is the Spirit's, and He takes a made up detail and attaches real intercession to it.

I would add one guardrail, because this can go wrong. The detail is never a claim about what is happening to them. It is a claim about their being a person. A woman getting off a bus is fine. A woman getting off a bus whose son has just left her is a story being written on somebody's behalf, and the difference matters.

You have been given a way past the fence line that costs nothing and takes four seconds, and Revelation 5 says the redeemed come out of every kindred and tongue, and the Spirit is the one who knows which particular person a made up coat has landed on.