And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.
John 14:13-14 (NIV)
Asking in His Name
By noon the field is half down and the cut half smells like every summer he’s had. He’s mowing the same ground he mowed last year and it’s taking him longer, and he knows how many hours it used to take because he has always known it. The tractor does the work, so that isn’t the part that slowed down. It’s the getting on and off, the walk out to the far corner, the length of the drink he takes in the shade at the end of a row. Nothing hurts, and all of it takes longer than it did.
The men he’s talking to are about to lose him. He has told them he’s going to the Father, and that they’ll do the works he has been doing and greater ones besides. Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, he tells them, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. Ask me for anything in my name and I will do it.
He says anything, and he doesn’t take it back. The asking has a purpose he states himself: the Father glorified in the Son. So when you pray in his name, you’re asking him to do something in your life that will show his Father in him.
That leaves the people who asked and did not get it, and there are a great many of them, and some of them were asking for a life. I have no sentence that settles that one. What he says is that the doing belongs to him and so does the shape of it. What he doesn’t say is that the shape will look to you like an answer.
I’m impatient by build. When I ask for something I want to know by the end of the day whether the answer is yes, and a week of quiet feels to me like being skipped over. Jesus never promised the men in that room a schedule. He promised them himself, and he promised it while he was packing to leave.
Out in the field the cut half is drying where it fell. Around two the wind comes across the standing hay and lays the tops all one way, and the man watches it cross from the shade at the end of the row. He gets up when it reaches the fence line, a second slower than he used to, and he gives himself the second.
A Prayer to Remember
Someone I love has been asking you for one thing, God, and lately they’ve stopped bringing it up. Do what your Son promised to do in his name, whatever that turns out to look like in their life. Let them hear something back before they decide the asking was foolish. And put someone beside them who stays steady when the answer takes years.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
