Two Times A Day In A House Of One

She started it in February and she has kept it, which surprises her more than anybody.

Two times a day. Morning, before the flat wakes up properly. Evening, after. The same short form both times, out of a book, about four minutes.

The trouble is the volume.

She shares with two other women. They are perfectly nice and completely uninterested, and there is no hostility anywhere in that flat, which she is grateful for, and which is somehow the exact thing that makes it awkward. Hostility would give her something to stand against. What she has instead is a girl in the next room watching something on a laptop with one earphone in, and a landing with a creaky board, and a bathroom door that does not shut properly.

So she says it under her breath.

And under her breath is fine, except that about six weeks in she noticed something happening. Words said with no air behind them start to feel like thinking rather than speaking, and thinking is what she does all day about everything, and the whole point of this was that it was not that.

Last Tuesday she said the evening one at almost normal volume by accident, because she had forgotten anybody was in, and halfway through the second line she heard the tap go in the bathroom and she dropped straight back down to a whisper without deciding to.

She finished it. She was annoyed with herself for about an hour afterwards, and could not have told you exactly why.

And underneath it all there is a thought she has been carrying since about March, which is that this whole thing is a bit absurd. These are words made for a room full of people. There are lines in the book where somebody is supposed to answer, and she says both parts, alone, in a small kitchen, with the kettle cooling.

He counted his own praises and nobody else did

Sit down on the counter a minute, because there is a line in the longest psalm in the Bible that has your exact situation in it, and it is stated with no embarrassment at all.

Seven times a day do I praise Thee because of Thy righteous judgments.Psalm 119:164

Seven times.

Now, who is counting? Not a congregation. Not a rota. There is no evidence anywhere in that psalm of an audience, a building, or another human being. It is one man, keeping his own count, of a thing nobody else in his household is doing, and he writes it down as a plain fact rather than as a confession.

That whole psalm is the record of a person doing this alone. Read it and you find him awake before dawn on his own, saying the words in the night watches on his own, praising at intervals through a day nobody was supervising.

Hear this in your small kitchen. You are not doing an absurd version of a real thing. The written word has a man praising seven times a day with nobody counting but himself, and the Holy Spirit was as present in that solitary count as in any temple full of people, and He is in your flat at ten past seven with the kettle cooling.

Now, the volume. Let us take that seriously rather than telling you to be bolder, because it is not really about courage.

Something happens when words leave the body, and the written word assumes it everywhere. A thought stays inside the loop it was made in. A spoken sentence goes out into the air of an actual room and comes back at your own ears, and you are now a person who has heard it, which is a different relationship to it entirely, and the Holy Spirit is in the air of that room.

That is not a technique. It is why the church has always said things out loud rather than thought them in unison, and it is why she noticed the difference by week six.

So the whispering is costing you something real, and you were right to be annoyed on Tuesday.

Hear this too. You are not obliged to be inaudible, and Scripture is what settles it. What is written puts a man's praise into the air seven times a day without one line about who might overhear it, and the Spirit of God has never asked anybody to make their prayer smaller so that a flatmate does not have to notice it.

Now the answering lines, because that is the part that has felt most ridiculous, and it is actually the best thing in your book.

You say both parts. You read the line and then you read the response, alone, in a kitchen.

You are not performing both roles in an empty theater. You are saying words that are being said, this week, by a great many people you will never meet, in kitchens and cars and hospital rooms all over the world, and the response is written there because the response is what the church says back, and the Holy Spirit is in all of it at once, and you are the church saying it back in that flat.

Nobody in that book ever assumed you had a room full of people. They assumed you had a mouth.