What I Say Before I Say It

Half seven, harbor car park, and he is in the van with the window down because the heater takes a while.

The phone is face up on the dash where he can see it. That is how the work comes now. It pings or it does not, and if it pings early it is usually a house move or a run to the tip, and if it has not pinged by nine it generally will not.

He knows the harbor better than he knows his own hallway. He can tell you which boat is missing from which mooring and what year it went and who crewed it, and he could tell you what the wall smelled like on a July morning when the ice was going aboard. There are two boats out there now. There were a lot more once, and he was on one of them for nineteen years.

He is a praying man. That is the thing. He prayed on the boat and he prays in the van, and this morning he has got as far as Lord, I thank You for all Your blessings, and Lord, You know all things, and Lord, I just want to say.

And then he stops, because the next sentence is I need work this week, and for some reason that one will not come out of his mouth to God. He can say it to his brother in law. He cannot say it upward without wrapping it in something first.

He starts again. Lord, I thank You. Same run up, same wall.

If you have ever done a long, warm, religious lap around the one thing you actually needed to say, sit with me for a bit.

The bit I say before the bit I mean

I want to name the run up, because most people have never had it named and they think it is reverence.

The preamble is not reverence. It is a person who has quietly picked up the idea that the plain thing is not welcome in the room, so it has to be introduced by something more presentable first. Thank You for all Your blessings. You know all things. I just want to say.

And then the real sentence sits there in the van with the heater going, unsaid.

Hear me while you are sitting in your own version of that car park. You are already welcome in that conversation and the plain sentence is welcome with you. I am not offering you my own generous opinion of God: Hebrews 4:16 says come boldly to the throne of grace to find help in time of need, and the Holy Spirit is the One who wrote the words time of need into that invitation rather than leaving it at time of worship.

Look at what that verse is willing to say out loud. Need. Not a crisis of the soul. Need, in the ordinary sense, the kind you can count on a Tuesday.

What He asked a man who could not see

There is a man sitting by a road outside Jericho with a cloak in front of him, and he shouts, and the crowd tells him to be quiet, and he shouts louder. And Jesus stops the whole procession and has him brought over.

Then Jesus asks him something that ought to be impossible to ask a blind beggar. What do you want Me to do for you? (Mark 10:51)

He knew. Of course He knew. He asked anyway, because He wanted the man to say it in his own mouth, in his own words, out loud, with a crowd standing there. And the man does not preface it. He does not say Rabbi, I thank You for all Your goodness and I just want to say. He says let me recover my sight.

You have that same permission and it was not issued on the strength of how well you word it. The written word shows the Lord Himself asking a man on the ground for the bare version, and the Holy Spirit put that exchange in the record so that no praying person would ever have to translate their need into religious before handing it over.

Say the wardrobe job. Say the week with nothing on the phone. Say the thing you would say to your brother in law, because that is the register the God of Mark 10 asked for.

He knew before you opened your mouth

Here is the part that takes the pressure off the wording, and I want to go slowly through it, because the pressure is where the technique creeps in.

Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him (Matthew 6:8). Jesus says that as the reason not to heap up empty phrases. So the ask was never for His information. It was never a form to be filled in correctly, and there is no better-worded version of your prayer sitting somewhere unfound that would have worked where yours did not.

You are being heard right now with the sentence half said, and I am not being kind to you at the expense of being accurate. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit helps us in our weakness, because we do not know what to pray for as we ought, and He Himself intercedes for us. The Holy Spirit is not standing over the van marking your grammar. He is inside the prayer, carrying it, while you are still trying to get to the point.

That is the whole reason this can be said badly. The current does not run on your phrasing.