The Prayer You Have Worn Smooth

It did not start out as nine words.

At the beginning it was paragraphs. You explained the situation to God as though He had come in halfway through, with the background and the names and the bit that made it worse than it looked from outside. You had reasons. You made a case. Some nights you argued, and some nights you offered things, and once or twice you got so far into it that you fell asleep in the middle and woke up cold with the lamp still on.

Then it got shorter. Not deliberately. That is not a decision anybody makes.

A year in it was a paragraph. A few years in it was a sentence. And now it is nine words, and they come out on their own, and half the time you are not aware of starting them. At the kettle. At the lights at the bottom of the hill, the ones that stay red long enough for a whole thought. In the small hours in that flat stretch between three and four when the house is quiet and everything is more honest than it is in daylight.

You get to the end of the nine words and cannot remember beginning them.

And that is the part that frightens you, if you are honest, and you have not said it out loud to anybody. Not the waiting. You have made a kind of arrangement with the waiting. What frightens you is that the words have gone smooth. They come out of you the way a phone number comes out, or the way you say fine when somebody asks. You cannot always feel them any more. You say the name that is at the center of it and there are afternoons when the name lands as flat as a word on a form.

You have started to wonder whether it still counts. Whether a thing said that often, that automatically, that thinly, is even a prayer.

I want to sit with you in that for a minute before I say anything else, because you have been alone in it for a long time. You have kept praying it and you have kept feeling like a fraud for praying it, and you have carried both of those at once for years without telling a soul.

You know the words. I do not know what they are and I am not going to guess. Yours might be a name and nothing else, or the same eleven words about a diagnosis, or about a door that has not opened, or about a person who does not ring.

Whatever the words are, they have been going up for years now, and you can say them without hearing them, and somewhere in the middle of all that you started to suspect that the smoothness is a fault in you.

What smooth actually is

There is a stone step at the back door of a house I know, and the middle of it has worn down into a shallow dip.

Nobody cut that dip. It is the record of feet: sixty years of boots going out before light and coming back after dark, of a woman carrying washing, of children who are grandparents now. The dip is not damage to the step. The dip is the history of the house written into stone by ordinary going and coming, and no workshop on earth could fake it.

Water does the same to a stone in a creek. Smooth is not the opposite of alive. Smooth is what long contact looks like.

Now hear what heaven does with the thing you think has gone thin.

And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints.Revelation 5:8

Read what those bowls have in them. Not the eloquent prayers. Not the ones that were felt strongly at the time. The prayers of saints, without qualification, gathered and kept and carried into the throne room like something valuable, in gold, by the people closest to the center of everything.

You have not been praying badly. Revelation 5:8 does not sort the bowls by how much the person meant it that morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a flat sentence said at a red light into that room exactly as He carries the ones that came with tears.

There is another picture, and it is smaller and even more tender. A psalm says God puts our tears in His bottle and asks, are they not in Thy book. Somebody thought to write down that God collects the parts of us we would consider spillage. Not the words. The wet on the face.

You were never asked to bring Him new material. Scripture never once sets a standard of freshness or feeling on a request, and the Holy Spirit does not lose interest in a petition on the grounds that He has heard it before.

That thought, that He might be tired of hearing it, is the one to look at squarely. It came from somewhere human. We get tired of hearing things because our attention is small and our love has a bottom to it. Neither is true of Him. A father does not sigh at a child's voice on the fourteenth day of asking, and God is not a wearier version of a good father. He is what our best fathers are a shadow of.

The part you did not stop doing

Now look at what has actually happened over these years, because it has been read as decline and it is not.

Jesus told a story about a widow who went to a judge again and again with the same request. He is described as telling it for one reason, and the reason is written into the sentence that introduces it: that men ought always to pray, and not to faint. Not that they ought to pray with better words. Not that they ought to feel it more strongly on the hundredth time than the first. That they ought not to stop.

The widow's repetition is not the flaw in that story. It is the whole point of the story. Jesus held her up.

You have gone on returning, and the returning is what He called faith. Luke 18:1 makes the not fainting the entire lesson, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept a person at it through years when nothing visible came back, which is not a small work and is not your achievement either.

Something in you has refused to stop asking. Look at that honestly. In every other area of life you are a reasonable person who lets go of unreasonable things. Here, for years, against the evidence, you have kept turning up with the same nine words. That is not sentiment and it is not habit. Habits die when they stop paying. This one has not paid in the way you wanted and you are still doing it.

You are not the reason it has not changed. The written word never once puts the outcome of a prayer on the quality of the asking, and the Holy Spirit is not standing between you and God waiting for you to phrase it better.

I want that said as plainly as I can say it, because I have watched what the other idea does to people. There is a cruel little belief that goes around: that a prayer would have been answered by now if it had been prayed properly, or believed properly, or meant properly on the right day. That belief has no floor under it. If the answer waited on your intensity, then everyone with a strong will would get everything and the poor in spirit would get nothing, and Jesus said the opposite about who is blessed.

The weight of this is not on you. It never was. Whatever He is doing with those nine words is His work, in His way, at His pace, and He has not handed you the responsibility for the timing of it.