The Prayer That Came Out Wrong

She has been praying since about eleven, and she would tell you she has not prayed at all today.

Both of those are true at once, and that is the whole problem.

What she meant to do was pray properly. Gather herself, find some words that had a shape to them, be reverent about it, the way she would if somebody were listening. What has actually happened is that she has said one sentence, over and over, somewhere between forty and a hundred times, and the sentence is please, please, no.

Around one o'clock it changed for a while and became something harder. Not blasphemy. Just blunt. Something close to why is this taking so long, said in a tone she would not use with a person she respected.

And then she apologized for it, which took longer than the prayer.

Now she is sitting with her hands in her lap feeling like somebody who cannot even do the one thing that is available to her in a corridor. Everybody else in her family would assume she has been praying all day. She has been. It just has not felt like it once.

That is your corridor. That is your one sentence. And I want to take that apart, because there is a verse that describes exactly what you have been doing, and it does not describe it as a failure.

Poured out is the instruction

David writes a psalm in a bad stretch, and in the middle of it he stops addressing God and turns to the people around him and tells them what to do.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out your heart before him.

Sit on the verb. Pouring out is not arranging. It is not composing. You pour something out when you tip the container and let whatever is in there come, in whatever order it is in, at whatever speed it comes at. Nobody pours a jug carefully into sentences.

And it is not offered as a concession for people having a bad day. It is an instruction, in the imperative, to everybody.

You have been obeying that verse all afternoon. Not failing at prayer, obeying the actual command in it. The written word tells people to tip out what is in them rather than to present something tidy, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman who has said the same four words a hundred times.

Now let me deal with the one o'clock sentence, because that is the one you are really carrying.

Why is this taking so long, said bluntly, to God, is not a lapse. It is roughly a quarter of the psalms. David says how long four times in one psalm and God kept it in the book. If bluntness disqualified a prayer, the middle of the Bible would be much shorter than it is.

You have not damaged anything with your tone. The written word preserves the raw prayers rather than editing them, which is God's own judgement on whether they were acceptable. The Holy Spirit did not flinch at one o'clock and He is not holding it now.

And the apologizing, which took longer than the prayer.

Some of that was reverence and it was lovely. Some of it was fear that you had spent something, that God had been put off, that the help might now be less available because you were short with Him. That second part is not reverence and it is not true.

You are not on thin ice with Him. The verse ends God is a refuge for us, and a refuge is not a thing you can be too rude to enter. The Holy Spirit has been the shelter over that seat all day, including the part where you were angry inside it.