I Never Sit Down In Prayer

Sixty one years old and she has never once settled into it.

She prays a great deal. Nobody would say otherwise. She prays while she works and while she drives and in the ten minutes before the house wakes, and all of it is real and some of it is very good.

But she has noticed something about the shape of it, and she noticed it because of her hands. When she prays she is always doing something, or about to do something, or standing somewhere on her way to somewhere else. Her body is in transit even when it is still.

She has never sat down, put her hands in her lap, and stayed.

If you asked her why, she would say she is busy, which is true and is not the reason. The reason, if she is honest, is that sitting down is what a person does when they are certain of being wanted for a while, and something in her has never got as far as that.

If you have never settled into it either, come and sit down at this table. Nobody is going to time you here.

The body says what the mouth does not

Let us pay attention to the hands, because they are more honest than any of the words have been.

A person who is genuinely certain of a welcome settles. They sit, they take the coat off, they stop calculating how long they have been there. A person who is not quite certain stays available: still standing, still half in motion, ready to be finished if finishing turns out to be the right thing.

That is what your hands have been reporting for years, and it is not a sin and it is not something she chose.

You are not on your way out. Nothing about a body kept in motion has ever described your welcome, and no length of stay has ever been the terms of it. I am not saying it to settle you. The written word says now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God (Ephesians 2:19), where household is a domestic word about people who sit down in a place, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who makes that hold at a kitchen table on a bright morning.

The king who sat down

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a new discipline to keep.

There is a moment where a king is given an enormous promise, and the next verse describes exactly what he did with it, in a detail nobody needed to record.

Then went king David in, and sat before the LORD, and he said, Who am I, O Lord GOD?2 Samuel 7:18

He went in, and he sat. In a culture where standing was the posture for addressing anyone of rank, and where a king would know that better than anybody, the record specifically says that he went in and sat down before God.

And what he says once he is seated is not confident. Who am I. So the sitting is not the posture of a man who thinks highly of himself. It is the posture of a man who is certain of his welcome and unsure of his worth, which are two entirely different questions.

You may be seated in a place while still being unsure of yourself, and the Word records a king doing exactly that. That is written down as a physical detail on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is what drives it home in a woman who has never taken her coat off.

Staying is not the new rule

Something has to be said before Thursday, because a capable woman will now try to sit for longer and will grade herself on the minutes.

That would make duration the measure and turn a welcome into an endurance test, and praying while your hands work is genuine praying and always has been.

You have a settled place whether you sit in it or move through it, and the place was not given on the condition of staying. Scripture says he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5), which answers the question of who might be finishing this and when, and the Holy Spirit is the one that has been at that table through sixty one years of a woman on her feet.

And if this has cost more than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the mornings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.