Just Talk to Him Like a Friend

Ciara gets about eleven seconds in.

She wants to pray. That is the thing to understand before anything else, because there is a version of this person who does not want to and she is not it. She sits down on purpose. She has cleared the evening for it before now.

And she gets in about eleven seconds and then one of three things happens.

It turns into a list. Things she needs to do, in order, quite efficiently, and she surfaces four minutes later having planned a week.

Or it turns into an apology, and stays there, and she goes round the same three things she is sorry about until she feels worse than when she sat down.

Or nothing. A kind of blank hum, and a strong awareness of the sound of the fridge.

She has been told, by good people, kindly, and probably forty times in her life, to just talk to Him like a friend.

She counts that as the least useful sentence anybody has ever said to her.

Not because it is untrue. She assumes it is true. It is useless to her because she does not know how to start a conversation with anybody, actually, and never has. She is the one at the table who is glad when somebody else asks the first question. Put her in front of a person she loves with no agenda and thirty minutes and she will be uncomfortable at about eleven seconds, and she has been like that since she was small.

So the advice has been: be spontaneous, in the one area of your life where you have never once been able to be spontaneous.

She was at a christening in her sister's church in February.

She goes to those. She stands and sits and does not sing, and it is fine, and it is not really hers.

And near the end everybody said the prayer. The one everybody knows. And Ciara said it too, because she knows it, the way everybody knows it, from school.

And it took about forty seconds.

And she got to the end of it and realized she had just prayed for forty seconds without once having to invent anything.

She cried in the porch afterward and her friend Maeve, who is not a fool, did not ask her what was wrong.

Now let me ask you what happens at your eleven second mark.

Because if this is yours, there is a specific thing that happens, and you know exactly what it is, and you have probably concluded that it is a fault in you rather than what it actually is.

What He did when He was asked

There is a scene in Luke that is easy to walk past because we already know how it ends.

It happened that while Jesus was praying in a certain place, after He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples."Luke 11:1

Stop on who is asking.

These are not beginners. They have been with Him for a long time. They have watched Him pray more than anybody in history has watched anybody pray, and they are Jewish men who have prayed daily since they were children and have a great deal of it by heart.

And what they say is: teach us.

Now here is what He does not say.

He does not say just talk to Him like a friend. He does not say there is no wrong way. He does not tell them to relax and let it come.

He gives them words.

Specific ones, in an order, short enough to memorize, and the order is not random: who He is, then what He is doing, then bread, then forgiveness, then help with what is coming.

He hands the most spiritual men available a form.

So hear this said over you, sitting in a stone porch not knowing why you are crying. You are not bad at prayer and there is nothing broken in you, and the thing you have been asked to produce out of nothing was handed out ready-made by Jesus to the people who knew Him best. That is written in Luke in His own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as helping in our weakness and interceding for us, and He was given precisely because people do not know what to pray.

Now let me be careful about the other ditch, because it is real.

I am not telling you a form is better than talking.

There are people who pray freely, out of their own head, at length, and it is not performance and it is one of the most beautiful things a human being does. If that is available to you, it is a gift and I am not taking it off you.

And I am not saying: from now on, only this. If I sent you away with a rule about your prayers I would have swapped one impossible standard for another and called it help.

Here is what I am actually saying, and it is small.

You have been told to improvise and you were never given the tune.

That is all that is wrong. Not your heart, not your seriousness, not your want. Every musician who improvises learned something by heart first, and every language you have ever heard somebody speak fluently was drilled into them in phrases before they could make a sentence of their own.

A form does not replace the talking. It gets you past eleven seconds.

And notice what the form does with the three things that happen to you. It has bread in it, so your list is already there and is allowed. It has forgiveness in it, so your apology has a place and, crucially, an end. And it has something for the blank hum, which is that when you have nothing at all you still have the first line, and you can say it and mean it and stop there.

The word says the Spirit helps in our weakness, because we do not know how to pray as we should, and it is God's own account of the situation you are in. And the same Spirit is the one who bears witness that you can say Father at all, which is exactly the word He put at the front of the prayer.

There is a reason this tradition kept written prayers around. Not to save anybody the trouble. To make sure that a person with nothing in them on a Wednesday was not left standing in a room with no door in it, and that is a mercy aimed at the weakest person present, which on many Wednesdays is everybody.