Your Mouth Gets There Before You Do

Here is a thing your mouth can do without consulting you.

Somebody comes round the corner of the car park and says "how are you?" and before the question has finished arriving, before any part of you has actually checked, you have already said it. Yeah. Good. Fine, thanks. And you both keep walking, and you meant it warmly, and they meant it warmly, and nothing dishonest has occurred, and yet if somebody had stopped you three paces later and asked what you just said, you would have had to guess.

It is a remarkable piece of engineering, that word. It runs on no power at all. It gets you through the shop, the school gate, the six minutes before a meeting starts, a phone call with somebody who is themselves having a difficult week and does not need yours on top. It is the small change of being a person among people, and it is not a sin, and half the sermons you have heard on this subject have made you feel worse about it than you needed to.

Then, once in a while, somebody does the double ask.

You know the double ask. They stop. They actually stop, with their body, and they turn slightly, and they say: "no, but how are you, really?" And a small alarm goes off somewhere behind your ribs, because the corridor version is loaded and ready and the other one is not written. So you produce a slightly longer fine. A fine with a bit of texture on it. Busy, you know, but good. Tired, but the good kind of tired. And they nod, and it does the job, and you get away, and you feel a strange low sting for the rest of the morning that you would struggle to explain to anybody.

Nothing so far is a scandal. Here is the part that is.

Last thing at night, when the house has gone quiet and the light is off and there is nobody in the room at all, you say it again. You say: I am fine, Lord. Thank You for today. It comes out in the same voice, at the same speed, with the same four-word shape as the one you gave the person in the car park, and it goes out into the dark, and you turn over.

You did not decide to do that. Nobody sat down one evening and chose it. It simply spread, the way a habit spreads, from the corridor to the phone to the kitchen to the last thirty seconds of the day, and the reason you have stopped noticing is that nothing about it ever felt like a decision.

This one is yours. Not because there is something rotten in you. Because a word that started out as good manners has quietly been given a job it was never built for, and the person it is now keeping out is the only one who was never in the corridor.

The word is a hinge, not a lie

Let us be accurate about what the word is doing, because accuracy is kinder here than passion.

A short answer at a school gate is not hypocrisy. It is proportion. The person asking has ninety seconds and a child pulling their arm, and pouring three years into that gap would not be honesty, it would be a small act of violence against a kind stranger. Most of the time the word "fine" is a hinge: a thing that lets a door swing without the whole house having to come apart. Hinges are good. Nobody is coming for your hinges.

The trouble is only ever this. A hinge that never opens is a wall with hardware on it.

And walls go up so slowly that nobody sees the building work. The habit gets stronger where it is rewarded, and it is rewarded everywhere: at work, in a corridor, at a family lunch where somebody would worry, in a group chat, with a friend who is already carrying too much. Every one of those was a real reason. Add them up over enough years and the muscle has been trained so thoroughly that it now fires in an empty room with the light off.

You are not in trouble with God over a habit you never chose. Scripture is full of people whose prayers arrive in a state, and the Holy Spirit was given as a helper rather than as an examiner, so the very fact that this is surfacing tonight is His work and not your indictment. Nothing here is a telling off. It is a door being pointed at.

Go and stand in a cave with a man who did not do this.

The heading over Psalm 142 says it was a prayer when he was in the cave, and he was in the cave because a king wanted him dead and there was nowhere left to be. He is a man with an anointing on his head, a war record, songs in circulation, and a considerable reputation for faith. And what he prays is not composed.

I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble.Psalm 142:2

Read what those two verbs are doing. Poured out is what you do with a jug, and the point of pouring is that you do not get to control the order things come out in. Shewed is showed: he put it in front of God the way you put an object on a table, without arranging it first. And the noun he uses is complaint. Not petition, not praise, not a tidied summary with the ugly part filed off. Complaint.

You have never once been asked to arrive at God with the improved version. The written word puts the raw jug in the psalm book and keeps it there for three thousand years, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a shaking sentence into the presence of God without needing it edited first. Heaven has no corridor. There is no version of God who has ninety seconds and a child pulling His arm.

God is not waiting for a better sentence

There is an idea in a lot of us that prayer is a kind of appointment you should turn up to prepared. It usually comes from somewhere respectable: a home where feelings were kept tidy, a season where falling apart was genuinely not an option, a teaching about reverence that got heard slightly wrong. So we save the real sentence for when we can say it properly, and the proper hour never comes, and the four-word version goes out night after night instead.

You have a way in that was opened by somebody else and does not depend on your composure. Scripture says we can come boldly to the throne of grace and find help in time of need, because the One who stands there has been tempted in every way we have, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that invitation feel like an address rather than a doctrine. The door is not answered on the quality of the knock.

And notice what the psalm does not do. It does not end with the cave cleared out. He pours out the complaint and he keeps talking, and the situation on the ground is exactly as dangerous at the end of the psalm as it was at the start. The honesty was not a technique for getting the cave changed. It was the man himself finally being in the room with God instead of sending a summary in.

You were never meant to be represented in prayer by a word you use on strangers. His word calls Him a refuge for the untidied version, and the Spirit of God has been drawing this to your attention for a while now, probably in the last thirty seconds of several nights. A refuge you only enter after tidying yourself up is not a refuge. It is a waiting room.