After The Shutter Comes Down

The shutter comes down at ten past eleven and the street noise goes with it. The fryers tick as they cool. The extractor keeps running for a while because it always does, and neither of them can be bothered to go up and turn it off yet.

She wipes the counter in long slow passes, the way you do when your feet have gone past aching into something quieter. He carries the mats out the back. It was a Wednesday, and Wednesdays have been what they have been for a while now.

She does the cashing up and she does not say anything out loud about it. He does not ask, either. He stood at that door most of the evening and he already knows.

The meter is in the cupboard by the back door, and the little digits move whether anyone comes in or not. That is the part neither of them says. Nobody walked in, and the cupboard kept counting.

Then they do what they have done every night since they took the lease. They stand in the middle of their own shop with the lights half off and they pray together, and it is short, and it is sincere, and it goes like this. Lord, we thank You for Your provision. We trust You with everything. We put it all in Your hands. Amen.

And then they turn the last light off and go up.

Neither of them has ever said the actual sentence. Not once, not in all these years, and not because they are faithless people. Because somewhere along the way it started to seem too small and too grubby a thing to bring upstairs to God.

You know the prayer I mean, and you know the sentence underneath it that never gets said.

The prayer you say instead of the prayer

There is nothing wrong with the prayer you say. Thanking God is right, trusting Him is right, and putting it in His hands is exactly where it belongs.

It is just that it is not the prayer. It is the polished version, and the polished version is what gets handed over at half past eleven at night, year after year, while the real one stays in the cupboard with the meter.

Let me name the reason, gently, because I do not think either of you has ever put words to it. Somewhere along the line the idea took hold that a material need has to be made spiritual before it is fit to hand over. That God receives worship and hearts and repentance, and that a standing charge on a small shop is beneath the conversation.

That idea is not in the book. Look at how Paul actually words it, and notice how little he leaves out.

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.Philippians 4:6

In every thing. Not in the spiritual things. Not in the ones that sound suitable when said out loud in a quiet shop. Every thing, and the word he chooses for what you bring is requests, which is the plainest, most ordinary word available to him.

You have permission for the plain sentence, and it was written down long before either of you signed a lease. His Spirit is the One who moved a man to put the word every there, and He has never once come back to narrow it.

He is not embarrassed by the cupboard

Here is the thing that I think has kept the sentence in the cupboard, and I will say it kindly, because it has been in there a long time.

You are afraid that said bare, with no thanksgiving wrapped round it and no trust language on the front of it, it will sound like complaining. Or worse, that it will sound like the shop matters more to you than He does. It will not, and it does not. The written word is full of people telling God the flat truth about their circumstances with nothing on top of it, Psalm 142:2 being a man pouring out his complaint in front of Him and showing Him his trouble, and the Holy Spirit saw to it that the honest version is the one that made it into the book.

You have a Father who is not embarrassed by what a small shop needs. Scripture says He knows what you need before you ask (Matthew 6:8), which means the asking was never about informing Him, and His Spirit is not standing at the bottom of your stairs deciding whether the wording was reverent enough to send up.

Say it as it stands. He has heard worse, He has heard smaller, and He has never once flinched at either.

Saying it plainly is not a technique

Now let me guard this, because there is a way of hearing what I have just said that would turn it into another job for you to do.

This is not a better method. Nobody is telling you that the plain prayer works and the polished one does not, or that there is a form of words that gets through where another form of words did not. That would just be handing you a new lock and a new key, and I am not doing that to two tired people at eleven at night.

The plain sentence is not more powerful. It is more honest, and honesty is not a lever either. What it does is put the actual thing in the actual conversation, so that God is being spoken to about your real life rather than about a version of your life that has been made presentable first.

And here is the part that takes the pressure off the wording altogether. You have help in the praying itself, because Romans 8:26 says the Spirit Himself helps us when we do not know how to put it, and He is not waiting for you to phrase it correctly before He carries it.