A Mind That Will Not Make Sentences

The light is off in the bathroom because the light is the last thing that would fit.

She is on the floor with her back against the side of the bath and the door shut, which is not dramatic, it is simply the only room in the flat with a door that shuts and no windows onto anything. She has been in here eleven minutes.

Today was not a catastrophe. That is the part she cannot explain to anyone. There was no event. There was a train that was too full, and a meeting that ran on, and a woman in the corridor who wanted to talk about a thing that could have been an email, and a supermarket with the wrong music, and a phone that would not stop, and by four o'clock her hands had begun to feel like they were somebody else's, and by six the words people said were arriving about half a second after their mouths moved.

Now it is nine and the flat is quiet and she is on the floor and she wants to pray.

She starts. Father.

And nothing comes after it, because the machinery that puts the second word onto the first has gone offline, and she can feel it not working the way you can feel a tooth.

She starts again. Lord, today.

Gone.

Six times. She counts, because counting is one of the few things still running. Six attempts at a sentence, and each one costs something she does not have, and after the sixth she stops trying and sits in the dark listening to the immersion heater.

And what she thinks, sitting there, is the sentence that will keep her awake later: I did not pray tonight. Not I could not. I did not.

Down at the bottom of her bag, under everything, there is a card from a quiet day she went on eighteen months ago, that she has meant to throw away four times because she does not like clutter and does not really believe in that sort of thing.

There are four printed lines on it.

She does not get the bag.

Pour out. Not compose. Pour out.

I want to sit down on the floor next to you for a minute, because there is one word in the psalms that is going to take about nine kilograms off you, and it has been sitting there the whole time.

Trust in Him at all times, ye people; pour out your heart before Him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out.

Not present. Not explain. Not organize into a sequence that would stand up if somebody were listening. Pour out is what you do with a jug, and a jug is not required to arrange its contents into paragraphs before it tips.

Hear this while you are still on the tiles. You are not a woman who did not pray tonight. The written word calls it pouring out, and six attempts at a sentence in the dark is a heart tipping over, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been receiving every one of those attempts since the first one, before the second word ever arrived.

Now let me name what actually happened today, because you have been calling it nothing.

Nothing did not happen. Your nervous system spent eleven hours holding a door shut against a corridor of noise, and by four o'clock it had spent everything it had, and by nine the part of you that builds sentences had gone off to lie down, which is not a spiritual condition. It is a body.

And the God who made that body is not standing outside the bathroom door waiting for you to reassemble yourself before He is willing to be spoken to.

Look at how the psalm goes at people. Trust in Him at all times. All times includes the times when you cannot say why, and cannot say how, and cannot say anything at all. If the psalm had meant most times it would have said most times.

Hear this too, and let it settle. You have not been avoiding God tonight; you have been sitting in the dark eleven feet from where you sleep, wanting Him, and Scripture calls wanting Him with your mouth shut trust, and the Spirit of God has been in that room since before you sat down on the floor. He does not need the sentence. He was never waiting on the sentence.

And now the card in the bottom of the bag, because it is the whole point and you have nearly thrown it away four times.

That card exists because somebody, at some point, understood exactly this: that there are nights when a person has nothing left to build with, and that on those nights what helps is not encouragement, it is a finished sentence that somebody else already built, printed small enough to hold.

Four lines. You do not have to make them. You do not have to mean them beautifully. You only have to let your eyes go across them and let your mouth follow, and the whole of the work has been done in advance by a stranger who was thinking about you before they knew you existed.

That is not a lesser prayer. That is a rope, and the written word is full of ropes: psalms with tunes we lost, a prayer the Lord Jesus handed to His friends when they asked for help, blessings written down so that ordinary people could say them without inventing anything. God has been putting finished sentences into the hands of exhausted people for three thousand years, and the Spirit who inspired every one of them is not less present when you read one off a card than when you make one up.

You are not further from Him on the bathroom floor than you were this morning. You are as near as you have been all day, and the reason you cannot feel it has a great deal to do with a train that was too full and nothing whatever to do with your standing before God.