Plain Enough For Vince

Quarter past three on a Thursday, and the loudest thing in the market hall is his own footsteps.

He straightens the tea towels. They did not need straightening. He straightens them again, because the alternative is standing still with empty hands in front of a stall that nobody is walking towards.

Three units on his row have the shutters down. The one opposite went in the spring and nobody has taken it since. The glass roof does what it always does at this hour and lays a long warm stripe right down the aisle, and there is nobody standing in the stripe.

The footfall has gone. The pitch rent has not.

At half four Vince comes over from the fish counter with two teas, and he does not dress it up for Vince. He says it flat out, the whole of it, the rent and how long he can hold on and what he has stopped ordering in, and Vince nods and says nothing clever and the two of them drink their tea.

Then he locks up. And on the walk to the car he tries to pray about it, and he cannot find a way in.

It is not that he does not believe. He does, and he has since he was nineteen. It is that every version of the sentence sounds either too small to be bothering God with or too raw to be saying in a prayer, so he stands at the boot with his keys in his hand and says nothing at all.

He could say it to Vince over a tea. He could not say it to God in a car park.

And if you have done that, if you have looked at the balance and then gone quiet with God because you could not find a spiritual way to put it, then sit down here with me a minute, because this one is yours.

The translating that happens before the prayer

There is a step most of us put in front of prayer without ever once deciding to, and I think it costs more than anything else I will name on this page. It is the translating.

You have a plain sentence, and you have had it for a good while. It is the one you would say to Vince over a tea, unadjusted, in the flat words of a man telling another man exactly where he is. And the written word has never asked you to convert it into anything else: Jesus put it as plainly as it can be put, that your Father knows what you need before you ask Him (Matthew 6:8), and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the car door waiting on a better draft.

The translating feels like reverence. That is why it is so hard to spot. It behaves like reverence right up until you notice that the conversion takes so long most evenings that you never reach the end of it, and a man who meant to pray goes to bed having said nothing.

So let me turn and say this to you, standing there with your keys in your hand. You are welcome exactly as you are, with the sentence you already have and nothing done to it. Scripture is not shy on this point: the psalms are full of men saying the raw version out loud, and not one of them was sent back to try it again, and His Spirit is the one who carries a plain sentence the whole way up (Romans 8:26).

Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.Matthew 6:8

Sit on that word before for a second, because it undoes the thing we keep doing. Before you ask Him. The asking was never a delivery of information. He is not waiting to be briefed, He is not learning anything at half four on a Thursday, and there is no version of your need that arrives at heaven as news.

He knew it before a word of it was said

Which raises the obvious question. If He already knows, why say it out loud at all.

Not because God needs the update. Because a need said out loud in front of Him is what a relationship does, and a need swallowed in a car park is what a relationship stops doing. The saying is not for His information. It is for the two of you.

You have a Father and not a committee. That is not a warm way of putting it that I reached for to soften the page, it is what the written word actually calls Him (Romans 8:15), and the Holy Spirit is the One who put the word Father in your mouth in the first place.

The second thing the translating quietly does is teach you that your need is the wrong sort of need. Pitch rent is not a spiritual subject, you think. God is busy with the dying and the persecuted and here I am about a stall.

You are not a small item on a very large desk. Scripture has God counting the hairs on a head and watching a sparrow fall, and Jesus deliberately picked the two least significant things He could find to make the point (Matthew 10:29 and 30), and the Holy Spirit did not keep that in the record as decoration.

The plain version is the prayer

So here is the whole of it, and it is not a technique. There is no technique on this page and I am not going to hand you one, because a form of words that works is exactly the thing the Bible does not sell.

Say the plain thing to God once.

You do not have to make it sound spiritual, and you never did. You are already His, and the asking costs you nothing at all, because the written word says you have been brought near by the blood of Christ (Ephesians 2:13) and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands you the access that was bought for you.

There is no better wording waiting to be found. There is no arrangement anywhere in Scripture where a more careful sentence gets a different result, and if somebody taught you there was, they taught you something the Bible does not contain and it has cost you a lot of quiet evenings.