Fluent In Public, Silent At Home

She prayed for a woman on Tuesday night and it was good.

She is allowed to say that. It was not a performance and she was not watching herself do it. There was a woman in front of her who had just said something difficult in a room of about forty people, and what came out of her mouth was exactly right, and specific, and it took ninety seconds and it landed, and the woman held onto her arm afterwards.

She got in the car at half past nine.

And from the car park to her own drive, which is eighteen minutes, she said nothing at all.

Not a word. Not a thank you. Not the thing she has said in cars since she was seventeen. She sat in traffic with the radio off and there was nothing in her mouth and nothing behind it either.

This is not new. It has been the shape of it for about two years and she has never once mentioned it.

In front of people: fluent. Specific. Warm. She can pray for somebody she met four minutes ago and get to the actual thing.

On her own: nothing.

And what has been growing in her over those two years, and what got much worse on Tuesday because the ninety seconds had been so good, is a suspicion she cannot get rid of. It is this: what if the public one is the only one. What if there is nothing underneath it. What if she has become a person who can produce prayer and cannot pray.

And that is you at your own steering wheel, or you would have closed this page.

The passage does not divide prayer into real and produced

Let me deal with the accusation first, because it is the loudest thing in that car and it is not true.

Here is what Paul says is going on underneath a praying person.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.Romans 8:26

Notice there is no category in that sentence for a prayer that is a performance and a prayer that is real. Paul is not sorting your Tuesday into two piles.

He says something much more useful: that in all praying there is a shortfall, and that Somebody is covering it, all the time, underneath.

You were carried on Tuesday night at half past eight and you were carried on Tuesday night at half past nine. It is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26), and the interceding does not stop when the room empties. The Holy Spirit was under the ninety seconds and He was in the car.

Now the ninety seconds, because you are about to throw them away and you must not.

You have started to suspect that because it was fluent it was hollow. That is a bad piece of reasoning and you would spot it instantly in somebody else.

Your ninety seconds on Tuesday were not a performance and the woman who held your arm was not deceived. It is written that the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God, and reveals them (1 Corinthians 2:10), and getting to the actual thing in a stranger in four minutes is not a technique that can be learned. The Holy Spirit gave you that, in that room, for her.

And now the car, and this is the part that will do the most work.

You have been treating the silence as the verdict on the fluency. It is not a verdict. It is a different thing entirely, and there is a reason for it that has nothing to do with being a fraud.

In front of a room you are praying about somebody else's thing, which you can see clearly because it is outside you. In the car you would be praying about your own, and you have not looked at that in a while, and you do not currently have language for it.

That is not hypocrisy. That is the ordinary difficulty of a person who has more inside them than will go into sentences.

You are not a person who can produce prayer and cannot pray. You are a person whose own weight has outgrown your vocabulary. It is written that we do not know what to pray for as we ought (Romans 8:26), and Paul says that about everybody including himself. The Holy Spirit's answer to that is not to make you fluent, it is to pray underneath you.

And I am not going to tell you what the two years have been. Nobody writing anything knows that and a page that diagnoses you from a paragraph is a page to be careful of.

You are not required to produce a word in that car for the eighteen minutes to have been prayer. It is written that He who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit (Romans 8:27). The Holy Spirit was speaking in the traffic and the Father heard it, and you were not asked to contribute.