The Sixth Floor, Before Six

The building belongs to him at this hour and he is the only thing moving in it.

Sixth floor. The lights run off sensors, so they come up a section at a time in front of him and go dark again behind him, and he has got used to walking around inside a small traveling square of light.

The bins go into the trolley in the same order every night. It is the one part of this job that was his own idea, and he is quietly proud of it.

At the end of the corridor he stops at the window, because the city is not up yet and that is worth looking at once a night.

So he prays, the way he always does about here, and he hears himself say it out loud. Lord, I ask You to bless the work of my hands, and to open the doors that You would have opened.

Then he stops. Not because a word of that is untrue. Because it is not what he came to the window to say.

What he came to say is that his girl's school shoes have gone through at the toe, that he has known about it since the weekend, and that he has not worked out what he is doing about it. That is the whole of it. That is the actual sentence.

He stands there with his hands on the trolley and cannot find a way to make that sound like a prayer, so he does not say it at all, and the sensor light clicks off over his head while he is still deciding.

You have a sentence like that, and you have been standing at a window with it too.

The translation you do before you speak

There is a step that happens between your chest and your mouth, and it goes so fast now that you no longer feel it. The need turns up in plain words. Shoes. The boiler. The thing on the mat. Somewhere on the way out it gets translated into doors and provision and favor, and what God receives is the translation instead of the need.

Nobody sat you down and taught you that. You picked it up in rooms where the plain version sounded small next to everybody else's, and where the people praying out loud seemed to have better vocabulary for your life than you did. So you learned to dress it before you brought it.

Now hear me, because this is not my opinion and I am not handing you a technique. You are already welcome to say the plain thing. Not once you have found nicer words for it. Now, tonight, in the words you would use telling a friend at a bus stop, because David wrote pour out your heart before him, and the verb in Psalm 62:8 is not composing, it is pouring. The Holy Spirit put that line in the written word so that no believer in any century would stand at a window with a real need and no permission to name it.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pouring is what you do with a jug. You do not arrange what is inside it first. You tip it, and what was in there is what comes out, and the man at the window has spent three years trying to decant.

He has heard bare need before and He did not flinch

Underneath the dressing up sits an assumption, and it is worth dragging into the light: that God is slightly above the subject. That He handles calling and character and destiny, and would rather not be brought a pair of shoes at ten to six.

Read what He says He has seen in Exodus 3:7. Not the spiritual condition of a nation. Bricks, taskmasters, backs, and the noise people make when they are worked past what a body can take. I have surely seen the affliction of my people, He says, and I know their sorrows. The first thing God says about His people out of that fire is a labor complaint, and He is the one who says it.

So you are not lowering the tone when you tell Him about the shoes. You are speaking the language He used first. And it is His Spirit inside you doing the asking with you, because Romans 8:26 says the Spirit helps us in our weakness when we do not know what to pray for as we ought, which means the plainest sentence you ever said to God had help behind it that you could not hear.

Hagar's boy in the desert composed nothing at all. Genesis 21:17 says God heard the voice of the lad where he was. Where he was. Not where a better organized person would have been by then, and not where he had promised himself he would be.

And you are heard where you are. Not at the front of a church, not on a good week, not once the thing is sorted: on the sixth floor with your hands on a trolley. That is exactly the sort of place Scripture keeps recording a cry being heard from, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it up.

Asking Him costs you nothing

There is a second reason the true sentence stays in the mouth, and it is arithmetic. It is the arithmetic of somebody who has been short a long time and has learned to ration. You keep the big ask back in case you need it later. You do not want to spend your credit with God on shoes.

There is no such account. That is the whole force of Matthew 6:8, where Jesus says your Father knows what you need before you ask Him, which on the face of it should make asking pointless and instead makes it free. He is not being informed. He is being talked to.

You have a Father who is not rationing you, and you are spending nothing at all when you open your mouth. Philippians 4:6 says in every thing, and every thing is a deliberately unguarded phrase, and the same Spirit who taught you to say Father is not about to be embarrassed by whatever you say next.

And if this has reached the point of danger, a home at risk or a child going without food, then reach for real help today and reach for it with your head up. That is not a failure of prayer. Hands are part of how God made you, and using them is faith with its sleeves rolled up.