I Cannot Pray Any More, Only Complain

Forty one years. Then a Tuesday in March, and then a house with the wrong number of chairs in it.

He was the one who prayed at meals. He was the one who prayed at the hospital, out loud, at the end, and everybody said afterwards how much it had helped them.

He has not prayed since. That is what he would say.

What actually happens is this. He sits down in the evening, in his own chair, and turns toward the thing he has done every night of his adult life, and what comes out is not what used to come out.

It is not gratitude and it is not petition. It is a list. It is the four days in February. It is the thing the registrar said. It is the fact that she was the one who was good at this, and that if the order had been the other way round she would have managed it far better than he is managing it, and that he cannot understand why it went the way it went.

And some nights it is one flat sentence, said out loud in an empty room, which is: I do not understand what You were doing.

He stops when he notices. Then he sits there feeling as though he has said something in a church that ought not to be said, and he has never told anybody about it, and eleven months in he has arrived at a settled and quiet conclusion.

He used to be a man who could pray. He is not one any more.

That is you, and you have been praying the entire time.

Four things I am not going to do

I am not going to tell you why it happened. I do not know, and the people who offer reasons at a graveside are almost always managing their own discomfort.

I am not going to tell you she is in a better place as though that settled the question. Whatever is true about where she is, she is not here, in a house with the wrong number of chairs, and that is the fact you are living in. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 88:1-2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

I am not going to ask you to be grateful for forty one years. You are grateful. That has never been in question, and it has nothing to do with what happens in that chair at nine in the evening. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 88:1-2, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

And I am not going to tell you when this eases. Nobody can and the ones who try mean well.

You are not further from God for what comes out of you. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit, Psalm 34:18, and there is no clause about the content of what the broken heart is saying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in that room at nine o'clock.

The psalm that opens the way you do

There is a psalm that begins exactly where you are, and it is worth reading the first two verses very slowly. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 88:1-2, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry.Psalm 88:1-2

Look at what he calls it. Let my prayer come before thee.

Now read what follows in that psalm. It is the darkest thing in the book. It is a man describing himself as counted among the dead, as shut up and unable to come out, as forsaken, and it is addressed to God from beginning to end. It ends without a resolution and nobody has ever tidied it.

And the writer calls the whole of that my prayer.

That is the thing I most want you to have tonight. What you have been doing in the chair for eleven months is not the failure of prayer. It is a form of prayer with a name, it has a long history, and there is an entire psalm built out of it and preserved without correction. This rests on Scripture in Psalm 88:1-2, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

You have been assuming that prayer is a particular register: composed, grateful, submitted. That register is real and it will come back. But it is one form of it, and the book you are holding is full of another kind, and the men who wrote those were not being punished for it.

You have not stopped praying. Scripture says let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry, Psalm 88:2, and the man saying it goes on to describe total darkness while still addressing God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a complaint the same distance as a hymn.

Complaint has an address

Here is the distinction that matters most, and it will settle something in you.

There is a difference between complaining about God and complaining to Him.

Complaining about God is a conversation with yourself, or with a friend, and it moves further away with every round of it, because there is nobody in it who can answer.

What you have been doing is the other thing. You sit down, you turn toward Him, and you say I do not understand what You were doing. That sentence has a second person in it. It is addressed. Scripture already said it in Psalm 88:1-2, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

That is not a man who has stopped praying. It is a man who has kept the appointment every single night for eleven months while carrying something he cannot lift.

And the fact that you stop when you notice, and feel that it ought not to be said, tells me where you learned your idea of prayer. Not from the Psalms, which are full of exactly this, but from rooms where only one register was ever spoken aloud.

You are not out of bounds. Scripture says pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us, Psalm 62:8, and pour out is an unmeasured word rather than a careful one, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over that chair assessing tone.

The one who prayed for everybody

There is something else, and it is the part nobody has said to you.

You were the one who prayed. At the meals, at the hospital, at the end. Everybody in that family has been carried by you at some point, and at the funeral three people said so. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 88:1-2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

Which means there is nobody whose job it is to pray for you.

That is not self pity, it is a structural fact about the position you have held for forty years, and it is why eleven months of this has been so isolated. The man who does the praying has nowhere to be the one prayed for. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 88:1-2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

So ask somebody. Not vaguely; specifically, one person: would you pray for me, because I cannot at the moment, or what I am doing does not feel like it.

Anybody who has been carried by you would count it as the smallest thing you have ever asked of them.

You are not required to be the one who prays for everybody indefinitely. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and the law needs somebody willing to be carried before it can be kept, and the Holy Spirit is described in Romans as the one who makes intercession when a person does not know what to say.