“Remember, Lord, how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
Isaiah 38:3 (NIV)
A King Turns to the Wall
“What did you have for dinner?”
His daughter asks it on the phone on Sundays, and he tells her something true enough to end the question. Her kitchen is loud behind her, the boys arguing over the last of the bread, the table going the way a table goes on a Sunday afternoon. His own freezer holds foil pans with masking tape on the lids and the oven setting written out in a hand that is not his. They came the week of the funeral, along with others that are long gone. He has been eating standing at the counter since February, mostly things that need no pan at all, and he leaves those pans where he can see them every time he reaches in.
A king was told to put his house in order, because he was going to die and would not recover. He turned his face to the wall and prayed. Remember, Lord, how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes.
He says what he says about himself, and then he stops. And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
Then the word came back through Isaiah. I have heard your prayer and seen your tears. Fifteen more years came with it, and a promise about the city as well. God took the weeping as part of what the king had come to say, and answered him for all of it.
The man at the counter prayed nearly that same prayer for a long time, in his own words, and he didn’t get more years with her. He has what the king started with, a face turned toward a wall and nothing left to put into words.
A Prayer to Remember
Lord, I’ve said the words so many times they’ve gone flat, and tonight there are none left in me. Take the crying as the thing I came to say. On Sunday she’ll call from that loud kitchen and it won’t be dinner she’s asking about. Get closer to her than I can down a telephone line.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
