Two Years Of The Same Prayer On The School Run

She prays at the second roundabout. Not on purpose. It just happens there, every morning, the same twelve words about her son, said while indicating right.

Two years of that. Seven hundred mornings, near enough.

And last Tuesday she got to the roundabout, said the twelve words, and felt absolutely nothing. Not doubt. Not grief. Nothing at all, the way you feel nothing when you sign your name.

She sat at the lights afterward and thought: I have worn it out. I have said it so many times that it has stopped being a prayer and turned into a thing my mouth does between the school gate and the office.

Then the worse thought, the one she has not said to anybody. If I cannot feel it any more, why would He be hearing it.

If you have a prayer that has gone smooth in your mouth from handling, come and sit in the passenger seat a minute. I am not going to tell you what your flatness means.

The flatness is not the message

Let us take the frightening thought out of the middle of the road first, because it has been sitting in the middle of the road for months.

Feeling is not the instrument that measures whether God hears. It never has been. It measures blood sugar, and sleep, and how the conversation at the breakfast table went, and how many times a thing has been said, and roughly forty other ordinary human variables, and not one of them is wired to heaven.

You are not further from God this Tuesday than you were on the first morning you prayed it. The distance did not change when the feeling did. That is not encouragement I am supplying. The written word puts it plainly, that neither death nor life nor things present nor things to come shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38 and 39), and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who makes that hold at a set of traffic lights on a wet morning when nothing at all is felt.

Read the list in that verse again some time. It is a long list, and it was written to cover everything a person could think of. Flatness at a roundabout did not need its own line.

Scripture keeps a prayer that landed on nothing

Here is what I want you to see, and it is not a technique for making the prayer feel fresh again.

But unto thee have I cried, O LORD; and in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee.Psalm 88:13

That is a man saying he prays in the morning, and the psalm he is saying it inside of is the bleakest one in the book. It ends in the dark. It does not resolve. Nobody tidied it up before it went into the songbook, and the songbook is the part of Scripture people were meant to sing together, out loud, on purpose.

You have not fallen out of the category of praying people. What you are doing in the car is prayer, in the same book, under the same name, and the Word never once graded it on warmth. That is written and kept, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a woman who has begun to suspect her own mouth.

Say the twelve words seven hundred more times if that is what love does in you. Repetition is not the enemy of a prayer. It is what a mother's love sounds like when it has nowhere else to go.

Worn smooth is not worn out

There is a difference between a coin worn smooth and a coin spent.

The smooth one has been carried in a pocket for years. You cannot read the date any more. It is still worth exactly what it was worth the day it was struck, and the wearing happened because it was kept close, not because it was thrown away.

Your two years of the same twelve words have not devalued them by one penny. You are carrying that prayer rather than repeating it, and carrying is what the Word calls casting your care upon Him, because He careth for you (1 Peter 5:7). The Holy Spirit is the one who lifts it out of the car, and the caring is His and always was, which is why the weight of it never depended on your delivery.

And if the flatness has spread past the prayer lately, if you are not sleeping, if you dread the morning itself, please speak to somebody real about that: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger. That is not stepping around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.