The Thing You Leave Out Of Prayers

Hisham prays about most things, and there is one subject that has never once come up.

He noticed by accident, which is the only way anybody notices this. He was keeping a list for a while, not out of piety but because his memory had started dropping things, and after a few months he read back through it.

Everything was on that list. The health of people he loves. A situation at work that had gone badly. His own temper, which he does not like. A friend's marriage. A decision. The thing his daughter said in the car that he has not been able to put down.

And there is one area of his life that appears nowhere.

Not once. Not in a general way, not as a passing line, not even as a thing he was avoiding but mentioned in order to avoid. It is simply not in the document, and it is not in the document because it has never been in a prayer, and it has never been in a prayer because at some point his praying learned to walk round a room without ever going in.

He did not decide that. That is the part he would want you to understand. There was no evening where he sat down and resolved to keep something back from God, which would be a strange and rather dramatic thing to do, and Hisham is not dramatic.

What happened is much quieter. Some things you pray about immediately, because they hurt in a way that goes straight upward. Some things you get to eventually. And a very small number of things sit in a room that the praying simply routes around, the way a path in a field goes round a stone rather than over it, and after a few years the path does not even feel like a detour any more. It feels like the way to the gate.

He sat with the list on his knee for a long time and then said something that surprised him, out loud, in an empty room. He said: I have been going round it since before my father died.

Now, hear the important thing before you begin on yourself.

Hisham is not a hypocrite and this is not a message about secret sin. Please hear that. What is in that room may not be shameful at all. It is very often not. It can be a grief, a hope so specific that saying it out loud feels like tempting something, a thing you have already decided about, or simply a place that got sore once and has been walked round ever since.

And nobody here is going to tell you that God is offended by the room. He is not. He has known about it the whole time and He has not once mentioned it in a tone you would recognize as annoyance.

You have your own version. There is something that does not come up when you pray, and you found it about a paragraph ago, and it took no effort at all to find.

Nobody is asking you to hand it over, and I want to say that early. There is no ask at the end of this and no plate anywhere in it.

Something has just been held outside a conversation for a long time.

He asks God to do the searching, which tells you it is not a self-improvement project

There is a psalm that everybody quotes at the end and hardly anybody reads as a request.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.Psalm 139:23

Notice who is doing the work. David does not say I will examine myself. He asks God to come and do it, which is the prayer of a man who knows perfectly well that a person cannot see the room they have been walking round, because the walking round is precisely what stops you noticing it is there.

And look where it sits. It is the last verse of a psalm that has spent twenty-two verses saying that God already knows everything: the sitting down and the rising up, the word before it is on the tongue, the darkness that is not dark to Him.

So it is not a request for information. He is not offering God news.

It is a man opening a door on a room the owner of the house has always been able to see into anyway, and doing it because a door being opened from the inside is a different event from a door being seen through.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are already fully known. That is not my reassurance: the written word says He knows your thought afar off and there is not a word on your tongue but He knows it altogether, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land on a man sitting with a list on his knee.

And there has never been a moment when He was outside the room. The word asks where can I go from Thy Spirit, and answers that there is nowhere, not the heights, not the depths, not the dark, and the Spirit is described as the one who searches all things and even the deep things, which means the routing has never once succeeded at what it was doing.

Nobody is asking you for anything

I want to be very plain now, because this is exactly where a message like this becomes a transaction, and this site would rather not exist than do that.

Nobody here wants the thing in that room. There is no ask at the end of this article and there will never be one anywhere on this site. Nothing here is held back behind a payment, nothing is gated, and nobody is going to tell you that opening a hand about something is what qualifies you to receive from God.

I am also not going to tell you what is in your room. I do not know. And I am not going to guess, because guessing at a stranger's private thing and then preaching at the guess is how people get hurt by writing like this.

And nobody is telling you that you have to go in tonight. You do not. The door being noticed is not nothing, and God is entirely capable of working with a man who has got as far as knowing where his own path bends.

And you will not be met with a rebuke in there. Not conditionally: the word says He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust, and it is the Spirit who makes that a felt safety rather than a doctrine, which is why people who finally say the thing so often report that it was gentler than fifteen years of not saying it.

What the grip is actually round

The reason this belongs in a set of articles about a closed hand is that a subject can be gripped exactly the way an object can.

And it is worth asking what the holding is for, because it is almost never what it looks like.

Sometimes what is being held is a hope, kept out of prayer because naming it would make its failure into a thing God did rather than a thing that happened. Sometimes it is a decision that was already made and does not want to be looked at by anybody with authority. Sometimes it is a grief that a person has agreed with themselves to carry at a certain temperature, and praying about it would raise the temperature.

All three of those are the act of a person protecting something, and protecting is not a crime.

And whatever it is protecting, He is able to hold instead. Not once you hand it over: the word says He is able to keep that which is committed unto Him, and able is the word Scripture chooses, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real place to set a thing down.