I Prayed and Then I Checked

Gordon does it in the right order, which is what made it so hard for him to see.

Bible at the kitchen table, quarter to six, most days for nineteen years. He prays properly, out loud sometimes, and there is nothing thin about it. He prays for the work, for his sons, for a man at his church going through something bad, and he means all of it and he would put his hand up to any of it in front of anybody.

And then he says amen, and reaches for the phone, and looks.

He would have told you, until quite recently, that this was simply what came next in the morning. Prayer, then a look at the day, then the boots on. Nothing in that order struck him as worth examining, because the prayer came first, and coming first was the thing he understood to matter.

Then he had a fortnight in the spring where the work was uncertain, and he noticed something he could not put back down.

He prayed those mornings the same as always. Same table, same length, same sincerity. And he was not settled when he said amen. He was settled about four seconds later, after he had looked, and on the two mornings where the look did not go the way he wanted, he was not settled at all, and the prayer he had just prayed did not move that by one inch.

That is the whole thing, and it is not about how often he checks. He does not check much. Once or twice a day, no more.

It is about which of the two does the settling.

You may be exactly the same. You may pray first, honestly, every morning, and be a person nobody could accuse of anything. And there may still be a small transaction happening four seconds after the amen, in which something else finishes the job the prayer was supposed to do.

Nobody is accusing you of anything. The evidence here is order and effect, both of which are observable, and neither requires you to confess a motive.

Something has been given the settling.

Nothing has to be wrong for something to be out of place

Let me get the freeing thing said first, because otherwise you will defend yourself for the rest of this page and hear none of it.

Looking is not sin. Knowing what you have is not sin. Being careful with what you are responsible for is not sin, and Scripture never treats a man who knows the state of his own house as a man of small faith. If you came here braced to be told that carefulness is faithlessness, put it down. It is not true and this page will not say it.

The question is not whether you look. It is what settles you, and whether you ever noticed which one it was.

There is a psalm that opens with a man raising his eyes and then correcting himself about where help actually comes from.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.Psalm 121:1-2

Read the two lines together, because the second one is doing something to the first.

He lifts his eyes to the hills, which is where a man in that country looked when he wanted to know whether he was safe. High ground. The direction of both help and threat. It is the most natural glance in the world.

And then he answers his own look. My help cometh from the Lord. Not from the hills. He does not stop looking at hills, and the psalm does not tell anybody to keep their eyes down. It relocates the source.

You have help that comes from one place. Not from four seconds after the amen. The written word takes the most natural look a man has and names what is actually behind it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live at a kitchen table at quarter to six.

Now let me say something about the app, because it has not done anything wrong.

It is a tool. It does its job well and there is nothing here that wants you to delete it or feel odd about opening it. The trouble is not that you look. The trouble is that a tool has been given the settling, and settling is not something a tool can hold, which is why the two bad mornings in the spring went the way they did.

You are not being asked to become careless. The written word never scolds a man for knowing where he stands, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a man who keeps track.

And now the part underneath the order.

A prayer that does not settle you has not failed. What has happened is that something else got there first and has been finishing the job for years, so quietly that the prayer never had the chance to do it. And a man cannot tell the difference from inside a good week. It takes a fortnight in the spring.

You are not a hypocrite for noticing this. My help cometh from the Lord, and the correction in that psalm is aimed at the source rather than at the man doing the looking. The Holy Spirit has been at that table for nineteen years of amens.