When the Answer Is You

GOD ROUTINELY ANSWERS PRAYER through people willing to be sent. Mercy often arrives through hands we never expected, and sometimes the hands are ours. I have spent most of my life at the asking end of prayer, watching heaven for movement. This chapter is about the other end: the night a stranger's prayer was answered by my headlights, and the year my own prayers were answered by my creditors.

Years ago I came home near midnight from a long flight, the kind that leaves your body unsure what hour it believes in. The next day was a holiday I had set apart for rest, deliberately and with some ceremony. Then the phone rang. My first thought shames me now: whoever this is can wait until the holiday is over. I had a small theology of rest assembled before the second ring, complete with supporting verses. The voice on the line told me about a woman who cleaned houses for her bread, whose employer was putting her out that very night. Out of the house meant onto the street, in the dark, on the eve of a holiday, in a country where she had no family and no one who owed her anything. By the time the voice finished talking I was looking for my shoes.

No official sent me that night. No committee had met, no assignment had been handed down, and the call did not come from anyone in my church. It came to my phone, and I decided long ago that it came from God, who does not route all His requests through official channels. He opens the door for a chance to serve Him, and He rarely asks first whether the hour is convenient. I went, and I went joyfully. That is the part I most want you to hear. I was wide awake despite the flight, and the ledger of lost sleep and spoiled holiday never once opened. Somewhere on that drive a thought arrived that has never left me. A woman standing beside her bags in the dark had almost certainly been praying, in whatever words she had left, and the headlights coming toward her were the answer arriving.

God usually answers prayer through people. That night let me stand on the far side of an answered prayer for once, and Scripture is strangely consistent about that side. When God wanted to feed a starving widow, He did not rain bread on her roof; He sent a prophet to her door. When a foreign official sat in his chariot baffled by the scroll on his lap, God sent Philip down a desert road to climb up and sit beside him. When five thousand people were hungry on a hillside, the Lord of all bread turned to His disciples and said, "You give them something to eat" (Luke 9:13 NKJV). He could have done each of these things with no courier at all. He mostly declines to. Most of the machinery of God's mercy, as far as I have watched it work, is a person willing to be interrupted.

Since that night, the command on the hillside has come looking for me in particular. A man in our community stopped me once and said he had just arrived in the area, that he had lost his job, and that he had a wife and children and no money for food. Stand inside those words a moment; each one lands heavier than the last. I knew exactly what Jesus would say about him, because He had already said it to the disciples, and this time no crowd stood between the sentence and me. So I gave him what was in my wallet. It was not much, and could not feed a family for even a day. I handed it over anyway, because the arithmetic of that hillside was on my side: what the disciples carried up the hill could not feed anybody either, and the Lord took it and blessed it. God begins with what we have, never with what we lack.

I should admit that my giving is supervised. At an intersection one day I passed a dollar out the window to a man begging there and settled back rather pleased with myself. My wife corrected me before the light changed. "Why just one dollar? What can they buy with that? Give them at least five." She was right, of course. If God begins with what we have, He means all of it, and she has always been quicker than I am to open the whole wallet.

The apostle James has a name for the very devout way of being useless. He had no patience with a religion that stays indoors with the door shut, and he says so bluntly enough that no commentary can sand it down:

If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Depart in peace, be warmed and filled," but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? (James 2:15-16)

Look closely at the man James is describing. "Depart in peace, be warmed and filled" is a blessing; it even has the shape of a prayer. The man means well. He has seen a real need, lifted it toward heaven with a kindly word, and walked on with a clear conscience. What never crosses his mind is that he himself was the delivery God had already dispatched.

There is a promise in Isaiah that fastens my prayers and my neighbor's hunger into a single sentence. I did not understand it until I had stood at both ends of it:

Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer; You shall cry, and He will say, `Here I am.' If you take away the yoke from your midst, The pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, If you extend your soul to the hungry And satisfy the afflicted soul, Then your light shall dawn in the darkness, And your darkness shall be as the noonday. (Isaiah 58:9-10)

Notice whose word God borrows here. Everywhere else in Scripture, "Here I am" is the servant's answer. The boy Samuel says it into the dark. Isaiah himself says it when the Lord asks whom He will send: "Here am I! Send me" (Isaiah 6:8). In this one place God lifts the servant's word into His own mouth, and He ties it to a condition: extend your soul to the hungry. We like to keep prayer in one room and the neighbor in another. The prophet knocks out the wall and says it is one room. I cannot explain the mechanics of that, and I distrust anyone who claims he can. I can only report what I have seen. The seasons when God has felt nearest to me have been the seasons when my door swung open most often, and I have never found that to be a coincidence.

Knowing this has made my own intercessions more dangerous to me, and they ought to be. When I lay a name before God now, I add a postscript: if the hands are meant to be mine, say so plainly. Sometimes the answer comes back within the week, and it costs me an evening, or money I had set aside for something pleasant, or a conversation I had been ducking. No one has been fully prayed for until the one praying has asked whether he himself is the reason the answer is still out on the road. That sounds harsh set down on paper. It is a happier arrangement than it looks, because being sent pays a wage I never saw coming.

The wage is a strange one. The people I am sent to keep almost nothing of me. They soon forget who I am, my name, what I look like, and where I live. What they do not forget is their encounter with Christ in that moment. A letter carrier does not expect you to remember his face; you remember who wrote to you. The errand was never meant to put me in the spotlight; it was meant to leave Christ in the spotlight once I had gone. The woman from that midnight call is safe now, and I doubt she could pick me out of a room today. I count that among the evidence that the errand was done properly.

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I FIRST LEARNED THIS truth from the receiving end, and I have held this piece of the story back until now on purpose. In the worst months of the year I told you about at the beginning of this book, when the calls and the letters were at their fiercest, I went looking for help first in the places a religious man looks, and most of what I found waiting there was advice. The hands that actually reached down into the wreckage and lifted weight off my back belonged to institutions I had been taught to picture as heartless, the very offices whose ringing telephones had become the daily sound of my fear. Some of my creditors simply wiped out my debts. What they did was written nowhere in the contract. The contract said I was fully and personally responsible for every cent, and there was no mercy anywhere in the paper. The mercy came from outside the paper.

The story kept unfolding, and here is the part that finally corrected my theology. Years later, back on my feet, I earned my bread for a season inside one of those same institutions, and only from the inside did I learn why they had forgiven me. It was consistent with their values. His hands are not fenced inside church walls. He is as free among ledgers and lending offices as He is among the pews, and I had been slow to grant Him the whole world to work in. When He chose to show me mercy that year, He wrote it into a creditor's accounting. I still meet people crushed under a money trouble I know from the inside, and what I most want to tell them is that I have carried that same weight and still live in God's providence with faith.

I should have known better, because I had watched providence travel through human hands since I was a boy. In the place where I grew up, the clergymen I knew as a child did not live on salaries. They lived on meal tins, the stacked metal kind that lock one above another. The faithful carried them to the door in rotation, each household taking its appointed turn with whatever the kitchen could spare. When the turn fell to a comfortable family, the tins came heavy, and the man of God gave thanks over them.

When the turn fell to a family that was itself scraping by, the tins came thin.

He gave thanks in exactly the same words, and then prayed for that struggling household with a particular tenderness, because he knew better than anyone what the thin tins had cost. As a boy I assumed I was watching poverty, and in one sense I was. I was also watching the petition for daily bread being answered every noon, one door at a time, through hands that were themselves often poor. No one involved ever reached for the word providence. It was just the tins. But if you had asked that man how the Father fed him, he could have pointed to the stack cooling on his step.

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THE HARDEST UNEXPECTED HANDS to receive belong to the person who hurt you. Many years ago I was working in a country not my own, on a team wrestling with a difficult project. One night a colleague and I argued over the right way to solve a problem. The next morning he sent out a harsh written attack on my work and copied it to everyone above us. I was a newcomer in that country, and my footing there was fragile in ways my colleagues never had to think about for a moment. I read his words with a cold weight in my stomach, counting what I stood to lose, which was far more than a job.

I did not retaliate. Others who had seen the message stood up and spoke for me, which I have never forgotten. When the colleague next appeared I tapped him on the shoulder, a small gesture meant to say I would not hold it against him. I meant it as far as I could reach that day. Forgiving a man and being healed of what he did are two different labors, and only the first of them was finished. The wound stayed open. I walked beside the ocean asking God for peace, and for a good while no peace came.

A week later I was sent on a work trip. When I arrived I found that the arrangements had quietly placed the two of us in one car, with him at the wheel. I waited for him in the parking lot, wondering what on earth we would say. He pulled up with a big smile, and we traded the small pleasantries men reach for when a boulder is sitting in the room between them. A few minutes down the road, his eyes on the traffic, he spoke.

"Look. I want to apologize for what happened last week." I answered quickly, the way a man hands back something hot. "It's OK." "No," he said. "It's not OK." Then he told me about the pressure riding him that morning, the anxieties that had been on his back for weeks, the way he had misread something I did and reached for the nearest weapon. He offered no excuses and asked for no pretending. Somewhere on that highway, between two men staring dead ahead the way men do when something true is finally being said, a soothing wave of healing washed over my heart that all my walking by the ocean had never produced. I felt the wound close. My affection for him climbed past where it had stood before he ever hurt me, and with it rose a plain desire to stand by him under whatever load had driven him to it. It's not OK was the truest sentence spoken in that car, and it is what made healing possible. My quick answer had been generous and false in the same breath. It waved the damage off while the damage went on aching underneath. His reply refused the wave.

He was insisting on the actual size of what he had done, and a debt has to be honestly measured before it can be honestly settled.

Two things came home to me on that drive. The first is that an unexpected apology is an answered prayer, and I choose those words with care. You cannot make another person repent. No technique schedules it, and no merit earns it. Many of the injured people I sit with will wait years for words that never come. When the words do arrive, unforced, out of a heart God has been quietly working on without your knowledge, you have been handed something no human effort could have manufactured. Receive it the way any miracle is received, with your shoes off.

The second is that real forgiveness carries a cost, and somebody always pays it. Suppose I back into your car in a parking lot and leave a dent, and then I find you and apologize with every ounce of sincerity in me. Your car is still dented. My apology does not touch the metal. The repair will cost whatever it costs; the only open question is who absorbs the bill. Forgiveness is the decision to shoulder that damage yourself. You release me from a debt that goes right on existing. This is why forgiveness aches even when it is entirely genuine, and why it can be genuine long before the aching stops. I had already absorbed the cost of my colleague's words a week before that drive. It was real forgiveness, and it hurt. His apology came alongside the cost and helped me carry it. The whole small scene is a copy of a far larger one, in which the One we had wounded chose to absorb in His own body the full cost of everything we had done, and to call the account settled.

I have to be honest that most wounds are never mended in a parked car with an apology. Forgiveness does not wait on the apology, and it does not even require one. To forgive is not to announce to the world and to yourself that everything is fine; it is to stop holding the person accountable for the damage, whether or not he ever admits there was any. And forgiving a man seventy times seven does not turn you into a doormat. You are still permitted to tell the one who hurt you how it felt. You are permitted, for a time, to step back out of his reach so he cannot keep injuring you. Trust, once broken, is rebuilt slowly, and the pain has a way of walking back in after you were sure it had gone, because healing from a wound is gradual work and not a single clean decision. None of that cancels the forgiveness. The releasing and the aching can go on side by side in the same heart for a long time, exactly as they did in mine.

One confession remains, and it belongs to every clergyman I know, though few of us say it out loud. People write to me as though I were the answer to their prayers. No matter how often we tell them we are only human, in their minds a clergyman is a kind of celestial being, an intermediary with more access to God than they are allowed, and more than a few see us frankly as messiahs. Our limitations, they assume, do not apply to us. So they write from places I have never been, having read something I wrote or heard something I said, and they ask me for money I do not have, for influence I do not have, for doors into countries and callings and cures I could not open if I wore out my knees trying. Every one of those letters cost its writer some hope to send. I answer as gently as I know how, and it saddens me every time, because I know from my own worst year what it is to aim a prayer at an address that cannot receive it. In those moments I think of Peter at the temple gate, looking down at a man who had been carried there to beg every day of his life:

Then Peter said, "Silver and gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk." (Acts 3:6)

The first half of that sentence is mine every day I live: silver and gold I do not have. The command that follows is miles beyond me. Unlike Peter, I cannot even heal, and I have stood beside too many hospital beds to pretend otherwise. But the hinge of Peter's sentence belongs to all of us: what I do have I give you. What I have is presence. I can sit with you. I can stay in the room when the news is bad, hear the whole story out without flinching, keep a hand on a shoulder, and pray with you slowly, out loud, in your own words. For years I rated this a small thing, privately ashamed of how small it was. I have since watched presence do what money in the same room could never have done. When a lonely person prays for help, presence is often the precise answer God has in mind, and He goes looking for someone ordinary enough to carry it without blocking the view.

Underneath every story in this chapter lies a sentence the Lord spoke about the last judgment, describing the hungry fed, the stranger taken in, the sick and the prisoner visited:

And the King will answer and say to them, `Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.' (Matthew 25:40)

The word visited deserves a longer look than we usually give it. The King says, "I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me" (Matthew 25:36). He might have said, "I was sick and you healed Me," or "I was in prison and you set Me free." He asks instead for the visit and the coming. Curing the sick and unlocking prisons lie beyond nearly all of us; sitting with the sick and the locked-up lies beyond almost none of us. If you carry the power to heal, then by all means heal, for doctors are sent into the world for exactly that. The rest of us are asked for care, and care is always within reach. The Lord never asks more of us than we have to give. The whole judgment scene runs on mercies the size of an ordinary afternoon.

The King's sentence runs back through every story in this chapter. The night I drove out to find a frightened woman on a dark street, I believed I was carrying Christ to her. The King's arithmetic says the traffic ran both ways: whatever was done for her that night was done to Him, which means He had reached the corner before my headlights did. The creditors who tore up my debts stood closer to His hands than they or I ever guessed. The families who filled the thin tins were laying a table for Him, one noon at a time. The colleague who refused my cheap absolution on a highway did for my heart what no one else alive could have done, and I do not believe he was working alone. In this economy we keep changing places, sent one year and rescued the next, and Christ stands somehow at both ends of every errand.

It took me longer to notice the other thing these stories share. The answers resemble one another, the way letters from a single correspondent resemble one another no matter whose hand delivers them. The forgiven debts carried a certain extravagance. The timing of the apology held tenderness in it, and the stack of tins cooling on a doorstep spoke of humility. The longer I looked, the more plainly I saw the same handwriting running through all of them.