He goes down at last against her shoulder, and she does not move him to the carrycot, because moving him is the part that wakes him. So she sits. The lamp is off and the street light comes through the curtain in a strip across the floor.
The bedroom door is shut. Behind it, above the skirting board, there is a bloom on the wall, gray at the edges and darker in the middle, and it has come back in the same place it came back last winter. There is a towel folded along the bottom of the wall. The dehumidifier they borrowed is off, because of the meter, and because of the noise.
Her husband is asleep on the sofa with his boots by the door and his phone face down, and he is up before it gets light.
She wants to pray. She has wanted to pray all evening. So she starts, in her head, quietly, the way she has started a hundred times: Father, thank You for all Your goodness to us, and we just ask that You would be with us in this season and provide according to Your will.
She stops. That is not it. She knew it was not it while she was saying it.
She tries again, slower, more careful, more reverent, and it comes out further away from the point than the first one did.
What she means is that the wall is wet and the baby coughs at night and they cannot move and she does not know what to do. That is the whole of it. That is the sentence.
She does not say that one. She says the tidy one instead, and then she sits in the dark with his head under her chin and the strip of light across the floor.
And you have done that too, more than once, or you would not have opened this.
Why the tidy one keeps coming out
It comes out because somebody taught you, without ever meaning to, that prayer has a register. That there is a way of speaking to God, and the way is warmer and vaguer and more general than the way you speak to your sister.
Nobody sat you down and said it. You picked it up in a room where the prayers were beautiful and nobody said the bare thing, and it went in the way things go in when a person is young and paying attention.
And there is a second reason underneath, which is the one that actually stops the sentence. It is the worry that the bare thing is too small. That a wall and a cough are household matters, and God has famine and war on His desk, and there is something a little embarrassing about troubling Him with the state of a rented bedroom.
I want that particular worry answered before we go any further, so hear this plainly where you are sitting. You are welcome to bring Him the wall exactly as it is, in the words you would use to your sister, and you have never once needed to raise the subject to a level He would find worth His time. This is not my encouragement. Psalm 142:2 has a man pouring out his complaint before God and showing Him his trouble, and the Holy Spirit put that verse in the record in the plain words the man actually used.
Nothing in that psalm has been tidied. It went in as it stood, and it stayed as it stood, for every reader since.
He is not embarrassed by the wall
Look at what God has actually accepted from people and it settles the question quickly.
He accepted a prophet lying down under a tree saying he had had enough, and He sent him bread and told him to eat and sleep before He said anything else at all (1 Kings 19:5 and 6). He accepted a woman in a temple doorway praying so plainly she was mistaken for a drunk. He accepted a man asking a king for timber for a wall and writing the request down without a scrap of embarrassment.
And when Jesus taught the disciples to pray, in the shortest and most famous prayer there has ever been, He put bread in it. Give us this day our daily bread (Matthew 6:11). Not strength for the day. Not favor. Bread, which is a material object you can hold and eat, sitting in the middle of the most spiritual sentence in the world.
So you have permission that predates you by a long way, and it is not permission I am extending, because it was never mine to extend. Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him (Matthew 6:8), and the Holy Spirit is not sitting between you and Him waiting for the sentence to be improved before He will carry it.
The wall is a real thing in a real room and God is not squeamish about real rooms. He made the plaster and the water and the child.
There is no wording that works
Now let me guard this from the other side, because a thing said kindly can still turn into a technique by morning, and I have watched it happen.
The plain sentence is not a better key than the tidy sentence. It is not more powerful. There is no arrangement in which the untidied version unlocks something the polite version could not, and if that thought ever arrives, that here at last is the way to say it, put it straight back down, because it is the old machinery returning in a new coat.
Here is the difference, and it is not a difference in force. The tidy prayer keeps you at a distance from your own life while you are speaking to God about it. The plain one puts you in the room with Him with the thing in your hands. Nothing changes in heaven when you drop the wording. Something changes in you.
You are already heard, right now, in the tidy version and the plain one alike, because being heard was settled by Christ and not by your vocabulary. Hebrews 4:16 says to come boldly to the throne of grace, and the boldness there is not about volume or phrasing, it is about the right to walk in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who assures you of that right on nights when you feel like a stranger at the door.
So this is not a method. It is permission to stop translating.
Asking costs you nothing.
I want to be exact about that, because it is the quiet fear underneath the whole business. Some part of you suspects that asking uses something up. That there is a limited patience, or a limited number of times a person can raise the same subject, and that if you say the plain sentence and nothing happens, you will have spent your last honest way of asking and will have to go back to the tidy ones for good.
That arithmetic does not exist. There is no account being drawn down when you speak, because the throne you are speaking to is called the throne of grace on purpose, and grace is the word Scripture uses for something that is never invoiced (Hebrews 4:16). You have the standing to walk in and say it, given to you in Christ and not issued against what you hold, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a plain sentence in a dark front room something other than a woman talking to herself.
Say it once. You do not have to say it well.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you are sitting. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ and it is not issued on the strength of what you have. Scripture is the ground under every word of it, the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely brave, and what God does about the money is His, however He answers, and nothing on this page pretends to know.
- Damp on that bedroom wall, you are on the list I am reading to God tonight and you are not too small for it. Psalm 142:2 has a man pouring out his complaint before Him and showing Him his trouble, and not one word of that was tidied on the way in. In the name of Jesus I say what you are, and I say it to the only One in this flat who is awake with me.
- Fear that the plain sentence is the one that will not be answered, you were never written anywhere in the word of God and you are not staying in my mouth. Jesus told a whole hillside that their Father knows what they need before they ask Him (Matthew 6:8), and the Holy Spirit carries up what I cannot get into words at all. I am not running out of ways to ask, because asking was never a set of ways.
- Lord, You are not embarrassed by a wet wall, and You have never once asked me to make my life sound better than it is before You would listen to it. Your own Son put bread in the prayer He taught (Matthew 6:11), so the ordinary and the material have been welcome in Your hearing from the beginning. Tonight I am telling You the untidied thing, in the words I would use to my sister, and I am adding nothing to the end of it.
Psalm 142:2
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
