Letters

Dear brother or sister in Christ,

By evening the day has taken what it came for. The dishes are stacked or they are not. Someone needed something at four o’clock that could not wait, and you gave it, and now the house is quiet in the way a room is quiet after people have gone.

This is the hour when prayer feels furthest off. Not because faith has failed, but because the body is tired, and a tired body makes a poor argument for anything.

We want to say one thing about that.

The Lord who said Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden was not speaking to the rested. He named the condition plainly: labouring, heavy laden. He did not ask them to set the load down first and then come. He asked them to come carrying it. That is the whole invitation, and it is enough for an evening like this one.

Elijah, after the greatest day of his life, sat down under a juniper tree and asked to die. What the Lord sent him was not a rebuke and not a sermon. An angel touched him and said, Arise and eat. He slept, and ate, and slept again. Only after that came the still small voice. There is a kind of tiredness that is answered with bread and sleep before it is answered with anything else, and the Lord has never been confused about which is which.

So if you have prayers tonight, pray them. If you have three words, say the three. If you have none, the Psalms have carried people through this hour for three thousand years, and they will carry you tonight without asking you to add anything. Open one. Read it slowly. Let it be the whole of your evening prayer.

Then go to bed. That is not a failure of devotion. It is obedience to the way you were made.

We pray for you in the tired evening — for the plain rest that puts a person back together, and for the morning, which belongs to the Lord as surely as this evening does.

May the Lord bless thee and keep thee.

A brother in Christ