As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you. And I will teach you the way that is good and right.
1 Samuel 12:23 (NIV)
Far Be It From Me
He sits in the chair nearest the double doors. When somebody on the inside presses the button and they swing, the little window gives up a piece of the hallway in there, and from any of the other chairs along that wall there’s nothing to look at but the doors.
He’s been coming twice a day since the baby was born, and every one of those visits has ended on this side of the doors. His daughter’s name is on the whiteboard behind the desk, and under it a weight in pounds and ounces. He’s learned four nurses’ names and he uses them. Every time the doors open he asks whoever’s coming out how the baby did overnight, and they tell him the piece of it they’re allowed to tell, and the volunteer at the desk has started looking up whenever the doors move.
The country had just asked for a king, and now they were asking Samuel to pray for them so they wouldn’t die for it. As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you.
Failing to pray for them would be a sin against the Lord. Samuel puts it in that register, answering the very people who had just asked him for it. And I will teach you the way that is good and right. They’d asked for the praying, and he gives them the teaching as well, in the same speech where he tells them he set the king over them himself and has walked ahead of them since he was a boy.
They got the king they asked for, and the praying stayed where it was. He goes on doing the one thing they came back to him for, and says so while they’re still standing there.
The volunteer says it on Friday, the sentence she’s been putting together all week, that he can’t keep stopping people in the hallway and he’ll have to wait like everybody else. He says all right. Then he asks her whether she’d tell them upstairs that he came, and she says she’s written it on the sheet every time, all three weeks of it. Before he’s up out of the chair she tells him the unit went to open hours on the first and nobody got around to changing the sign, so he can come in at seven tomorrow, same as the mothers.
A Prayer to Remember
Lord, there are people I’ve stopped praying for, and I told myself it was acceptance. Samuel called the stopping a sin against you, and he said so to the faces of the people who had just come to him for it. Three names come up when I think about that, and they’re coming up now, and you know them already.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
