By Name · Week 1 · Monday · SCREENS
She is on the third level of a hospital parking garage with the engine off. Her son is ten. This afternoon a doctor used a word she had to look up on her phone in the elevator, and she has not stopped looking things up since.
Now she has four paragraphs typed out. It is a good post. It asks for prayer without begging. It is brave without being dramatic. She has read enough of these from other people to know how they go, and she knows exactly what happens when she presses the button. Hundreds of hearts. People she has not talked to since high school telling her they are praying. The feeling of being carried by a lot of people at once, which on a day like today sounds like the only thing that might hold her up.
Her thumb is over the button. She reads it one more time.
It was his story before it was hers
The second time through, she notices something she did not notice writing it. Every sentence is about her son. His symptoms, his tests, the word. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to him, and he does not even know the word yet. He is in a bed four floors up watching a cartoon.
In a few years he will be fifteen, and anyone who wants to can scroll back and find this day, written in his mom’s voice, before he ever got to decide what he thought about it.
Do not give dogs what is holy; do not throw your pearls before swine. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.Matthew 7:6 (BSB)
Jesus was not talking about a phone. But I think the shape of this verse fits better than we would like it to. What is holy here is not hers to hand out. It is a ten-year-old’s hardest day.
And the crowd is not the villain in this story. Nobody in it would mean any harm. They would pray for him at six o’clock, sincerely, and by nine they would be scrolling past somebody’s vacation. That is what trampling can look like. Not cruelty. Just a lot of feet moving on.
She asked the one person the post was standing in for
She deleted it. Not saved as a draft. Deleted.
Then she texted two people, her sister and one friend from her small group: can you call me tonight. That was the whole message.
And then she did the thing the post had been standing in for. She sat in a parked car and asked God for help, out loud, and not very well.
So if you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!Matthew 7:11 (BSB)
I want to be careful with that verse. It does not promise her the test results she wants. It promises that the Father who hears her is better at giving than she is, and that she can ask Him directly instead of asking a crowd to ask for her.
What it cost: her husband was on a plane home and could not be reached. Her sister called back at nine. The friend did not answer until the next morning. She carried it that night with almost no one.
No hundreds of hearts. No one told her she was brave. She was the only person who knew she had chosen anything at all.
It was not hers to post. It was his before he knew it existed.
Some things are precious because of whose they are. She decided that one belonged to her son, and to God, and to the two people who called her back.
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