One Line Over And Over

Eight words. She has been saying them for two years and two months.

She could not tell you exactly when it started. There was a period where reading anything longer than about a paragraph was beyond her, and a period after that where it was possible but expensive, and somewhere in there the eight words appeared and stayed.

She says them getting out of the car. She says them at the door of the building before she goes in, and on the stairs, and once memorably about forty times in a room with strip lighting.

They are not from a book. They are half a verse, roughly, with a couple of the words changed by wear.

And she is ashamed of them.

Not of the words. Of the arrangement. Of the fact that at forty three years old her entire prayer life is eight words on a loop, when the woman she sits next to reads a chapter a day and has a system, and when there was a period in her twenties when she could pray for forty minutes and did.

She has a picture in her head of what a grown up believer's inner life looks like and it is not this.

She has tried to expand it. Twice. Both times it lasted a fortnight and left her worse, and after the second one she stopped trying and just kept saying the eight words, quietly, without telling anybody, like a person with a habit rather than a practice.

Somebody asked her at a thing in March how her prayer life was. She said, fine, thank you, and changed the subject inside four seconds.

Twenty six times, and it is in the Bible on purpose

Sit down with your mug, because there is a psalm that does exactly what you do, and it is not a footnote, it is a whole psalm, and it is in there deliberately.

Psalm 136 has twenty six verses. Every single one of them ends with the same clause. Not a variation. The same words, twenty six times in a row.

O give thanks unto the Lord; for He is good: for His mercy endureth for ever.Psalm 136:1

For His mercy endureth for ever. And then again. And again. Through creation, through the sea, through kings and wilderness and bread, twenty six times, without one apology and without one line explaining why.

It was sung antiphonally. A voice said the first half and a whole room said the second, and they did that twenty six times, together, out loud, in a building.

Hear this in your own chair. You are not at the shallow end of anything, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture gives a whole psalm to one repeated clause, and the Holy Spirit is the one who inspired it that way, and He did not do it for beginners.

Now let me name the picture in your head, because it is the actual weight and it did not come from Scripture.

A chapter a day. A system. Forty minutes. That picture is real, and there are people for whom it is right and good, and the woman you sit next to is not doing anything wrong.

But it is one shape, from one century, mostly from one kind of temperament, and it has been quietly installed as the standard, and it is not in the Book anywhere as the standard.

What is in the Book is the tax collector who could not lift his eyes and said one sentence, and the thief who got out eleven words, and blind Bartimaeus who shouted the same thing twice and was told to be quiet and shouted it louder.

Hear this too, and let it come off you. You have not failed to progress, and Scripture is what says so. What is written repeats one clause twenty six times without embarrassment, and the Spirit of God has been in every one of the two years of your eight words, and He has never once compared you to the woman in the next seat.

And now the two attempts, because I want to say something about them.

Both times you tried to expand it and both times it cost more than it returned and you came back worse. That is data, and it is not a moral fact about you, and nothing written in Scripture makes it one, and the Holy Spirit was with you through both attempts. You are not lazy and you are not stalled. You are a person with a real limit who has been trying to meet a standard designed by people without that limit.

The eight words are not what you settled for. They are what fits, and they have run for two years and two months, which is longer than either of the systems lasted.