The Sentence Was Twenty Five Years

She was sixty one when they read it out and she did the arithmetic before the judge finished the sentence, because that is what a mother's head does.

Twenty five years. He was thirty four.

She will be eighty six. Her own mother made it to seventy nine and her father did not see sixty.

And she has never once said that out loud in that church.

What she says, when people ask, is that they are believing God. What people say to her is that they are praying for the appeal, and that the Lord is able to turn a judge's heart in one day, and that they have seen situations like this turn around, and that she should not receive that number into her spirit.

Her Bible study has been praying for early release for two years. Two of those women are on their knees about it and she knows they are and she loves them for it.

And what she cannot say, in that room, on a Tuesday night, is that she has already accepted the number. Not in defeat. In arithmetic. She accepted it in about the fourth week, sitting in her car in a parking garage, and everything since then has been about how to live inside it.

She rides four hours each way, one Saturday a month. She has memorized the rules about what she can wear and what she can bring. She knows the guard on the third door by name and she knows his daughter is in college now.

That is what her love looks like now, and it is enormous, and nobody in that Tuesday night group is praying about any of it, because all of the praying is aimed at making it stop.

If that is a parking garage anybody has sat in, stay right here. There is a verse in Hebrews about this and almost nobody preaches it.

Remember them, as bound with them

Here it is, and notice that there is not one word in it about getting anybody out.

Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.Hebrews 13:3

Remember them. As bound with them.

That is the instruction the New Testament gives about people in prison, and it is not intercession for release. It is not a campaign. It is a command to stay in it with them, to be present to the fact of it, to let it be as real to you as if it were your own body in there.

There is no clause about a sentence being shortened. There is no promise attached about doors opening. It is a command about company inside a condition that is currently the case.

You are doing the biblical thing already, and you were never falling short by living inside the number. Hebrews 13:3 asks for remembering and being bound with rather than for a release, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put a command about staying in it into the letter without a word about getting anybody out.

Now look at what that does to the four hours each way. In that verse, what you have been doing every month for two years is not a coping arrangement. It is obedience, precisely and specifically, and nobody in that Tuesday group has ever prayed about it because nobody has read it that way.

You have been keeping a commandment in a car for eight hours a month, and you were never merely enduring it. Hebrews 13:3 makes what you do the instruction rather than the fallback, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been in that car every mile of it.

The room that is praying for the door

Now let me protect those women, because two of them are on their knees and you love them.

They are praying for release because release is the only shape of hope they have language for. In their world, faith reaches for the mountain to move, and here the mountain is a number, and so the number is what they aim at.

That is not naive and it is not wrong to pray. God does turn things and has turned things and nobody on this page is arguing with anybody's prayers.

But there is a cost that nobody has counted, and it lands on one woman in that room.

When every prayer aims at the number going away, the woman living inside the number has nowhere to stand. She cannot say she has accepted it, because accepting it sounds like unbelief. So she says they are believing God and she goes home, and the actual eight hours of her actual month goes unmentioned and unblessed and unprayed for by anybody.

That is not their fault. It is a gap in the vocabulary of the room, and it is costing her the ability to be honest in the one place she should be able to be.

Right now, as you read this, you are in the company of one who never needed the number to move before He would come near, and you were never required to hold a door open in order to be prayed for. Hebrews 13:3 commands presence inside the bonds rather than deliverance from them, and His Spirit has been in that Tuesday night room with you every week.

Comfort that gets inside the fence

Here is the center of it.

There are two kinds of comfort available to a woman in this situation and only one of them is any use.

The first is the comfort of the appeal. It says: hold on, because this might end. That comfort has a due date on it, and when the date passes it does not just fail, it takes something with it.

The second is comfort that comes inside the fence. It does not need the sentence to change. It arrives in the visitation room, on the third Saturday, in the forty minutes.

Scripture is full of the second kind and short on the first. Joseph is in a prison and the text says the Lord was with him there. Not that the Lord got him out immediately, which took years. That the Lord was with him in it. Paul writes half of his letters from custody and the tone of them is not a man waiting for a door.

You are accompanied inside the fence, and you were never left outside a comfort that only works if the number changes. Genesis 39:21 says the Lord was with Joseph in the prison itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that visitation room on every third Saturday for two years.