The notebook · September 18, 2026

The request I no longer make

I reopened an old notebook last week, for a reason that had nothing to do with any of this. I was looking for a date. I landed on a page where I had written four lines, and the third one asked for something I no longer ask for.

It was not a shock. It was worse: it took me a moment to remember what it referred to.

The situation did not resolve. It is exactly where it was. Nor did I give it up one day, deliberately, telling myself that was enough. I decided nothing at all. The request simply stopped coming, the way a light goes out in a room you are not in.

I used to think the hard part of a long prayer was keeping it up. I am finding it is not. The hard part is that stopping cannot be felt. There is no last time you recognise while you are living it. There is only a page reread two years later, by accident, while looking for something else.

There is a line in Luke I thought I knew. Before the parable of the widow, Luke writes that Jesus told it to show them “that they must always pray, and not give up”. For years I heard an instruction about endurance in that, something to do more of, and I was not wrong, though it never helped me much. What holds me now is elsewhere. Give up is not what I did. Giving up would have taken a decision, and a decision leaves a mark I could go back and find.

And the parable does not end on a settled promise. It ends on a question: “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

I have no answer, and I do not think the question is waiting for mine. It leaves me with precisely what I found in my notebook: a line that stopped without anyone withdrawing it.

I have not put the request back on my list. I do not know whether I still mean it, and I do not want to say it again out of discipline, just so as not to be the one who let it drop. I did one thing, and it is small. I copied the line onto today’s page, changing nothing and adding nothing, so that I will meet it again tomorrow morning and see what I do with it once it is no longer a surprise.

In Manna, one prayer a day, and a memory of what you asked for longer than you remember asking.