Borrowed Breath

I read Nehemiah this morning and was struck by the prayerful attitude of this man. The whole second half of chapter 1 is a prayer of confession and intercession. And then we jump to chapter 2 where Nehemiah is about to ask a pagan king for permission and provision to go rebuild the wall around Jerusalem.

The king noticed that Nehemiah looked sad and asked why. Nehemiah fearfully answered the king and told him of the state of Jerusalem. And the king is touched and inquires, “What are you requesting?”

The next sentence is amazing. Nehemiah writes in the scriptures, “So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, ‘If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ graves, that I may rebuild it.’”

As the king is asking the question, while Nehemiah is preparing his answer, in the normal flow of conversation, Nehemiah says, “So I prayed to the God of heaven.” He did not drop to his knees, fingers intertwined in clenched hands, eyes forcefully shut, uttering some faux-pious rhetoric using archaic pronouns. He just prayed as he answered the king, asking for the King of kings to aid him, to be with him.

He fulfilled what the apostle Paul later instructs the church in Thessalonica to do when he wrote, “Pray without ceasing.” And the rest of the book only enforces this attitude of dependence that Nehemiah possessed.