Somebody Prayed For You Before You Had a Name

Grandmothers do this. Great-aunts. A man three generations back you would not recognise in a photograph. They sat somewhere quiet and put a person in front of God who did not exist yet, and then they died, and the prayer kept going.

I am a shepherd and I sit at a lot of kitchen tables, and I have started asking people a question that unsettles them. Who prayed for you before you were born? Almost nobody knows. Almost everybody suspects.

Here is what I have noticed about the people who suspect. They can usually point at a moment in their life that should have gone another way and did not. A car that stopped. A friend who called on the wrong night for the right reason. A door that closed and turned out to be mercy. They tell it as a funny story, and halfway through the telling their voice changes.

Some of you have been protected by an arrangement made before you arrived, and you have been calling it luck.

I am not going to build a whole doctrine on your grandmother. But I will say this. Something was set in motion around your life a long time ago, and you have been living inside the results of it without ever seeing the paperwork.

The design in you is not a thing you assembled. It was placed. And placed things have someone who placed them.

You are not the first person to take your life seriously. Somebody was doing it before you got here.