Borrowed Is Not False

She set a timer for ten minutes, which she is aware is a slightly ridiculous thing to do.

Minute one goes on getting comfortable, which means getting uncomfortable, because the chair is wrong and the radiator ticks. Minute two she starts a sentence. Father, thank You for. And then stops, because thank You for what, exactly, on a Wednesday like this one, and she is not going to say something she does not mean, because that is the one thing she has always refused to do.

Minute four she tries a different opening. Lord, I am struggling with. And she hears how that sounds, the small self pitying dip in it, and she takes it out.

Minute six she notices what she is doing. She is drafting. She is composing an address to God and editing it for tone, in her own head, alone in a room, like a woman rewriting an email to somebody at work who intimidates her.

There is a book on her knee. There has been a book on her knee the entire time, and it has printed prayers in it that people have said for four hundred years, and she has not opened it, because opening it would be cheating.

That is the actual word she uses. Cheating.

At minute nine she opens it anyway, because the alternative is another blank minute, and she reads three lines of somebody else's prayer out loud in an empty room in a flat voice.

And she cries at the third line.

And then, sitting there with her face wet, holding a book of words she did not write, she feels like a fraud twice over, because she did not even produce the thing that undid her.

The Spirit does not wait for you to find the wording

Here is the sentence, and I want you to notice who it is written to. Not to weak believers. Not to a struggling minority. To a whole church, by an apostle, about all of us, in the plainest possible terms.

In the same way the Spirit comes alongside our weakness. For we do not know what to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes with groanings too deep for words.Romans 8:26

We do not know what to pray as we ought.

That is not a diagnosis of your Wednesday. That is the standing condition of every praying person who has ever lived, written down by the man who wrote half the letters, in the first person plural, without embarrassment.

So the blank at minute two is not a sign that something has gone wrong with you. It is the ordinary weather of prayer, and the verse assumes it, and it does not offer you a technique for getting past it. It offers you a Person who is already at work in the gap.

And look at what the written word says the Holy Spirit does there. He intercedes. With groanings too deep for words. Not with better wording. Not with your wording once you have got it right. The whole traffic of that verse runs underneath language, which means the words were never the currency and you have been trying to pay in a coin nobody at the counter wanted.

Now, the fraud. Let us take that apart properly, because it is the thing that actually keeps you sitting there with a shut book.

You think that words you did not compose are a performance, and that a real prayer would come out of you fresh, and that reading somebody else's is a kind of lip syncing.

But consider what happened the one time His friends asked for help with this. They did not ask for a method. They said, teach us to pray. And He did not say, be spontaneous. He did not say, wait until it rises up in you naturally.

He gave them a text. Words. To say. And they said them, and generations have said them since, out loud, together, on time, in fields and in kitchens and in prisons, and nobody has ever suggested that this was second class praying.

The book of prayers most used by the church for three thousand years is a book of other people's poems, and it is written into the middle of Scripture on purpose, and the Holy Spirit breathed every line of it. When you say the twenty third psalm at a graveside you are borrowing the words of a man who died three millennia ago, and you are not pretending to be him, and nobody in that churchyard thinks you are.

The whole point of the tradition standing behind this page was exactly that: put the prayers into a language a man behind a plow could actually say, set them at a time that does not depend on him feeling like it, and let people who did not choose each other say the same sentences in the same hour. That was not a lowering of the standard. It was a rope thrown to ordinary people, on purpose.

And hear the other half, because I do not want to swap one weight for another. There is nothing wrong with the prayer that comes out of you unrehearsed. It is not lesser, and it is not greater. A man talking to his father in his own words and a man reading a page his great grandmother read are doing the same thing in two hands, and heaven has never once graded the handwriting.

So here is the thing to keep.

You cried at the third line. That was not you being taken in by good writing. That was the third line saying accurately what was already in you, which you could not get out, because the getting out is the exact thing that had failed for nine minutes.

The words were borrowed. The crying was yours.