Beside Each Other Is Not Together

She has been in that room every week for five months and she could not tell you what a single one of them is going through.

That is not because they are cold. It is a good room. People are warm at the door, they mean it, and two of them have brought food to her house in the past year without being asked.

It is the shape of the thing.

Everybody arrives. Somebody opens. And then there is a period of time in which eleven people pray, out loud, in turn, about their own situations, in a way that is honest and often moving. Somebody's son. Somebody's diagnosis. Somebody's job.

And then it finishes and everybody says amen and gets their coat.

She has counted, more than once, without meaning to. Nobody has ever prayed about somebody else's thing. Not once in five months. Eleven people take turns being alone in front of God with ten people listening, and everyone goes home carrying exactly what they came in with.

If you have been in a room like that, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to call your group a failure.

The verb requires a transfer

Here is the instruction, and it is six words long, and the whole thing is in the verb.

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.Galatians 6:2

Bear. Carry. Take the weight of.

Now notice what that word demands, physically, in order to happen at all. A burden that is carried by somebody else has to leave the first person's hands. That is what carrying is. If it is still entirely on you and I am standing beside you being sympathetic about it, nothing has been borne, however warm the sympathy.

And notice the second thing: he does not say pray about one another's burdens. He says bear them, which is broader and more practical and considerably more inconvenient, and it includes prayer and does not stop there.

So the test of that room is not whether people are kind. They plainly are. The test is whether anything has changed hands.

And on the evidence of five months, nothing has. Eleven people arrive with eleven burdens and leave with the same eleven, and the room has done everything except the verb.

You have named something real, and it was already real and it is not ingratitude. Galatians 6:2 is where that sits, in a verb about weight leaving one person's hands, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to choose carrying rather than sympathizing is the one who lets a woman say so without feeling disloyal.

Nobody in that room built this on purpose

Now let me be careful, because she is about to become the person with a critique of her own prayer group and that is a lonely and unhelpful position to occupy.

Nobody designed that shape. It arrived. It is the default shape of almost every prayer meeting in the English-speaking world, and it arrived because taking turns is fair, and because praying about your own situation is honest, and because nobody has ever stood up in one of those rooms and proposed something else.

And it is not nothing. Eleven people saying true things out loud in front of each other every week for five months is a great deal more than most people have anywhere, and if she pulled that thread carelessly she could damage something genuinely good.

The problem is only that the shape has no transfer in it. The room is arranged for disclosure, which is valuable, and disclosure is not carrying, and the two have been quietly conflated for so long that everybody leaves feeling that something happened, because something did, just not the thing in the verse.

You have a room that is already most of the way there, and it was never broken. He promised it, in the picture of the man let down through a roof by friends who did the moving while he lay still (Mark 2:4), and His Spirit does not require anybody to dismantle a good thing in order to add the missing half.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And there are diagnoses being prayed about in that room, so let me be plain: nothing on this site connects going without food to anybody getting well. Where illness is present, everybody stays with their doctors and does exactly what they say, and that is not a lesser kind of faith.

And nothing here makes a group superior to being on your own. Everything in this article can be done by two people who never attend anything.

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at the edge of it because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by attendance or by health.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.