The Letter That Never Comes

The mailbox is at the bottom of the drive, three hundred yards down, and Kimo walks to it every day at about four.

The land case has been in front of somebody for three years. First it was one office, then it was another office, then it was a review, and then it was a different review, and at some point during the second year Kimo stopped being able to explain to anybody what stage it was at, because the stages stopped being distinguishable.

It is his grandmother's land. Fourteen acres and a fishpond wall and a family that has been arguing about it politely since 1987 and less politely since she died. Kimo is the one who took it on. Nobody asked him to; he is just the one who took it on.

Here is what has happened to his prayer.

In the first year he prayed detailed prayers with names in them. In the second year it was shorter. Now, walking down at four, what he says out loud, once, at the box, is one word.

Please.

That is it. That is all of it. He opens the box, and there is nothing in it that is not a bill or an advertisement, and he says please, and he walks back up.

He is forty-nine. He has begun to be a little ashamed of the one word, because it sounds like a child, and because a man his age with a Bible on his shelf ought to be able to do better than that.

Here is the day it caught.

His aunt, visiting, walked down with him. Old lady, moves slow, took ten minutes to do the three hundred yards. And at the box she watched him open it and close it and she heard him say the word.

And on the walk back up she said, "Who are you saying that to?"

And Kimo said, "God."

And she said, "Then that is not a small prayer. That is a big prayer with a small word."

And she carried on up the hill talking about somebody's wedding, and Kimo walked behind her and did not say anything, because it had not once occurred to him in three years that the size of a prayer might have anything to do with who was on the other end of it.

You have a word like that. Something you say at a door or a window or a box, once a day, that you have started to be embarrassed about because it does not sound like a real prayer anymore.

A title, not a favor

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you the letter is coming. I do not know. I am not going to tell you what the outcome will be for the land or the case or the family, and I am not going to explain the three years to you, because I have no explanation and I would rather be quiet than confident.

What I will do is take you to one line in a psalm, and I want you to notice that it is a name rather than a request.

O thou that hearest prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come.Psalm 65:2

That is how the verse addresses Him. Not Lord, please hear my prayer. Not Lord, if You would hear. It uses hearing-prayer as a title. It is His name in that sentence, the way the Almighty is a name.

Think about what a title is. It is not something a person does when the conditions are right. It is what they are. A judge is a judge when court is not in session. A father is a father while he sleeps. And this verse addresses God as the One who hears prayer, full stop, as a description of what He is rather than an account of what He sometimes does.

You are speaking to somebody for whom hearing is not an activity but an identity, and that changes what your one word lands in. Psalm 65:2 uses the hearing as a name rather than as a request, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off a page and down a drive at four in the afternoon.

And then the second half. Unto thee shall all flesh come. All flesh. Not the eloquent. Not the practiced. All flesh, meaning everybody, meaning the man with the one word at the box.

You have not been disqualified by the size of the word, and the verse widens the door as far as it will go on purpose. It is written that all flesh comes to Him, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient open door a present one at the bottom of a driveway.

The size of a prayer is the size of who hears it

Now let me be careful, because this could go wrong.

I am not going to tell you that short prayers are better, or that God prefers simplicity, or any of that. That is just the opposite superstition. The man who prays for an hour is not doing it wrong either. There is no scoreboard here in any direction, and anybody who hands you one has invented it.

What the aunt said on the hill is the true thing, and it is worth having plainly: the size of a prayer is not the size of the words in it. It is the size of who is on the other end.

You have been handing one word to somebody enormous, and there is nothing small about that transaction from His side of it. Psalm 65 spends the next several verses on Him setting mountains and stilling seas, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the scale of the Hearer in view when the words have run out.

That matters especially for a man who has started to be ashamed. Shame about how you pray is one of the most effective ways to stop praying entirely, and it almost always dresses itself up as respect. I should not bring Him something this thin. But the thinness was never the currency.

You were never asked to bring a quantity, and Scripture never once measures a prayer by its length anywhere in either testament. Jesus taught His disciples in Matthew 6 not to use vain repetitions in the belief they would be heard for much speaking, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps that from becoming a new rule and leaves it as a release.

Let me say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If three years of walking down to an empty box has taken you somewhere heavier than frustration, or if the weight of holding this for a whole family has gone somewhere dark, do not carry that alone on the hill. Tell somebody tonight. Your aunt, a friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you anything about the land. That is me refusing to leave you walking up that drive by yourself.