Praying As If I Am Interrupting

She keeps it short. She has always assumed that was a virtue.

Quick, specific, and out of the way. She would say she does not like to go on, and that God does not need the whole story, and both of those sound perfectly healthy and neither of them is the actual reason.

The actual reason is that she has a picture, and in the picture He is in the middle of something. Not annoyed. Not unwilling. Occupied, in the way a very good doctor is occupied, and there are people waiting whose situations are considerably more serious than hers.

So she does what a considerate person does with a busy professional. She is brief, she leads with the essentials, and she gets off the line.

Fourteen years of efficient praying. And she has never once stayed in the room after she finished, because staying would mean taking up time that somebody else could be using.

If you keep it short out of consideration, come and sit down. Nothing here is going to be added to your list.

The picture is of a very good doctor

Let us look at the picture itself, because it is unusually flattering and that is what has protected it.

It is not a picture of an unkind God. That would be easy to spot and easy to argue with. It is a picture of a highly competent one with a heavy caseload and limited hours, and it is respectful, and it makes the person holding it feel considerate rather than distant.

But a caseload implies a queue, and a queue implies that attention given to one person is attention taken from another, and that is a picture built out of the only kind of attention any of us has ever seen.

You are not taking a place in a queue. Nothing about your praying has ever cost anybody else anything, and God has never once been divided among the people He is attending to. I am not saying it to be encouraging. The written word says the eyes of the LORD are in every place (Proverbs 15:3), which is a description of a capacity nothing in ordinary life prepares us for, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that hold in a kitchen with the door open.

Who the invitation names

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not an instruction to pray longer.

The most famous invitation in the Gospels is addressed to a specific group, and it is worth noticing who is on the list.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.Matthew 11:28

Laboring and heavy laden. Those are the qualifications. Not urgent cases, not serious situations, not people whose need meets a threshold. Tiredness. Weight. The ordinary condition of somebody at the end of an ordinary week.

And it is an invitation, which means the initiative is entirely on His side. Nobody who comes in response to an invitation is interrupting anything.

You are answering rather than intruding, and the Word puts the first move on His side. That is written as a summons rather than as a permission, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts that in the hands of a woman who has been keeping it brief for fourteen years.

Do not now try to linger

Something has to be said before Sunday, because a considerate woman will now attempt to stay longer and will measure herself against it.

That would make duration the new requirement, and short prayers are not a problem. Some of the best prayers in Scripture are four words long, and there is nothing wrong with brief.

What comes off is only the reason: the sense that brevity is being paid as a courtesy to somebody with a queue behind you.

You have His attention as a settled fact whether you are there for a minute or an hour. Scripture says casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you (1 Peter 5:7), where all is the measure and the caring is His disposition and neither is rationed, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who has been in that kitchen for fourteen years of efficient visits.

And if this has cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings 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.