The Year You Stopped Praying

It Is Enough

Three days earlier he had called down fire in front of the whole country. It had worked. Everything he had staked his life on had been vindicated in public, in front of the people who had spent years telling him he was wrong, and the crowd had fallen on their faces, and he had outrun a chariot to Jezreel in the rain. There is no better day in his file. There may not be a better day in anyone’s.

And then a woman sent him a message, and he ran, and somewhere south of Beersheba he left his servant behind and went out into the wilderness by himself for a day, and sat down under a broom tree, and asked God to kill him.

Then he went to sleep. That is the part I would ask you to sit with, because it is the least prophetic thing in the passage and the most recognizable. An angel wakes him, feeds him, and he lies back down. The angel comes a second time. The text does not record him praying under that tree. It records him asking to die and then sleeping, which are the two things a man does when he is finished.

I do not know why you stopped. I am not going to ask, and this book does not require an answer, because it is not about that. It is about the same stretch of months from the other side — not what you were doing, which you remember well enough, but what was going on around you while you were not looking. Because here is what was true while Elijah was asleep under that tree, convinced he was the last one left in the country.

Seven thousand people were not bowing to Baal. They were not doing it because of him. They had not been recruited, or organized, or encouraged, and most of them had presumably never heard his name. He was not aware of a single one of them. His absence from the field made no difference to the count, and his despair did not reduce it, and it went on being true the entire time he was under that tree wanting to die. He did not find this out by feeling better. He found it out because God eventually told him the number.

The seven thousand did not require his attention in order to exist. They only required it in order to be known.

This book makes one argument and I would rather put it here than make you find it.

There was a stretch of time in which you largely stopped praying. You know which one. And you have concluded that not much happened during it, and that conclusion has been sitting in you for years doing quiet work. The conclusion is not a memory. It is an inference, and it was drawn from a single fact — that you were not paying attention — and that fact reports on you rather than on the period. Divine action is not participatory. It does not check whether anyone is watching before it proceeds.

Which means there is likely a record of those months that you have never seen, in places that were never your memory in the first place, and that most of it is still recoverable. It is going to take some work and it is not going to give you everything. But you are not going to have to feel anything in order to do it, which is a mercy, because feeling things about that period is precisely what you cannot currently manage.

Name the Year

Nothing in this book will work until the season has edges. Right now it almost certainly does not. What you have is a region rather than a period — a few years back, a while ago, that stretch in my forties. Fog with no boundary, which is exactly how it feels from inside and exactly what makes it impossible to examine. You cannot pull the records for a fog. You can pull them for a year. So the whole of this chapter is one request. Two dates. Start with the beginning, which is easier than you expect.

Not when it got bad. When it started. Those are different, and men reliably reach for the second because the second is the part that hurt. There is usually a marker. Something happened, and the drift began after it rather than before, and if you push at the question for a few minutes you will find you can date the marker to within a month or two. You have simply never been asked to.

A move — a new church, a new city, a new role you had not done before

A death — a parent, a mentor, a member you were close to

A birth, or a child leaving

A vote, or a board meeting, or a conversation in a parking lot afterward

A diagnosis, yours or someone’s

A departure — someone who left the church and took others

If more than one of those is a candidate, take the earliest. You are not trying to identify the cause. You are trying to find the edge.

The end is harder, and it is harder for a reason worth knowing.

Seasons like this do not end on a day. They thin out. There is no morning on which a man notices he has started praying again, because the resumption is gradual and partial and it happens underneath the level at which anything gets noticed.

So do not look for the end. Look instead for the first thing on the far side of it — the first stretch you can describe in some detail, the first project you remember caring about, the first month you can account for. Work backward from that and put your second date a little before it. It does not need to be right. It needs to be defensible.

Write both dates somewhere. Not in your head.

Here is why the bounding matters more than it looks like it should.

An unbounded season grows. It has nothing to stop it, so it takes territory on both sides, and the years adjacent to it get absorbed into it and quietly reclassified. A man says he lost a few years. He means, when he actually looks, about nineteen months. And he has been paying on the other thirty for a decade without ever checking the balance.

That is not a consolation and I do not want it heard as one. Nineteen months is a long time and nothing here is meant to shrink it. But it is nineteen months rather than four years, and the difference between those two sentences is not a matter of attitude. It is a matter of accuracy, and accuracy is the only thing this book has to offer you.

The correction can also run the other way, and I would be dishonest not to say so. Some men will do this and find the period was longer than they had been telling themselves, because the beginning was earlier than the part that hurt. If that is where the dates land, that is where they land. You are not conducting this in order to feel better about the answer. Two dates. Then we can go and look.

What You Decided About It

You have a sentence for that year. Most people do. It is short, and you have said it out loud to somebody — a friend at a conference, your wife, a counselor if you went to one. Five or six words, delivered in a tone that closes the subject rather than opening it.

Whatever yours is, notice how efficient it is. Two or three years of your life and the whole thing fits inside one breath. That is not a character flaw and it is not unusual. It is what happens to any period a person has stopped examining. The summary gets rehearsed and the material does not, and after enough repetitions the summary is the only thing still in the drawer. You do not have that season anymore. You have the sentence about it. Take the sentence apart, because there are two claims inside it and they are not the same kind of claim.

Both of those arrive feeling like things you remember. Neither one is. I am going to leave the second one alone. Not because it is settled and not because I have privately decided it is untrue. I do not know why you stopped. It is not mine to work out, and men stop for reasons that run from the culpable to the medical with most cases mixed somewhere in between. A book that tried to sort yours from the outside would be doing something worse than guessing.