Prayer: Stones

Prayer. It weighs on me like a stone sometimes. Most times these days.

It’s not that I don’t want to pray. I just don’t know how. How do I pray? All I really do is cry and ache these days, and call it prayer. What is prayer if it is not birthed from that? I guess there is the faithful prayer, and the disciplined prayer, but these autumn days are filled with aching and crying.

There is a girl that works with me, not in close proximity but on the floor I am on. She wants to be a He. And has taken steps in that direction. She is also only in her early 20’s. She known by a man’s name around the office, but I found out the other day that her real name is Leah. When I heard that my heart just sank and I couldn’t help but ache for her. Ache for my God, the God who is my Father and the Father of everything living to come and be her Father. To come and hold her like He holds me sometimes. To tell her it’s going to be okay and that she is beautiful.

She’s not even a convincible he. I have more facial hair than she does, and my voice is deeper. I’ve had shorter hair and well. Were it not for this tell-tell body of mine, I would pull of a much better man than she. But I have also been incredibly healed in so many of my sexuality questions. So much of my feminity and desire for wholeness as a woman has only recently happened.

My housemate was just talking to me about a woman she knows, let’s call her “Susan”, who was kicked out of her parents house at the rip old age of 13. And was left to fend for herself all these years. She’s in her 30’s now and has a pre adolescent son who has some developmental disorders. She is also the victim of everyone’s rejection of her. To this day. And my beautiful friend was sitting on the couch crying because she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t even know how to pray for her any more. Susan used to live with my housemate, but the Lord strongly told her that it was time for Susan to have her own house. So my housemate obeyed and stopped (in whatever way) enabling Susan in her brokenness. But Susan has been a victim for so long that she knows no other way of living.

This weighs on my heart like a stone. This ache breaks my heart because I have no answers. I know the only answer is for Jesus to break through (like I so desperately need in some deep dark areas of my own life) and deliver her from her wretchedness into her true identity as a daughter of the King. But how does that happen when a person (like myself) is more comfortable living in the slop of self-pity and loathing than in donning robes of righteousness and crowns of glory and playing the part of reality?

There really was no answer I could give my housemate as she wept over Susan longing for God to do something. There is no answer because I found myself relating so closely with her description of this broken woman. And I ache for that deliverance in my own temple of flesh and bone, but I’m struggling to let in the light that will make it day.

These muscles of righteousness and purity have been far out of use. I just wonder how it will turn out. For me, for Susan, and for Leah. I feel it is times like this that I become prayer. I am them, she is me. I ache for deliverance for her, I ache for me. Surely one of us, maybe even all of us will see the Hand of God someday. I just hope that I can keep my heart before him and not run away, like I so often do.