She has not got any words and she has taken that as the end of the matter.
It was not always like this. She used to be articulate about it, in the way somebody who reads a lot is articulate, and there was a period of about a decade when she could talk properly about all of it for as long as you liked.
That is gone. What is there now is a kind of flatness where the words used to be.
And so she has stopped, because she believes what she has stopped doing is prayer, and prayer as she understands it is made of sentences, and she has none.
There is a bit more to it than that, and this is the part that keeps her stuck.
She feels that turning up with nothing would be worse than not turning up. Empty handed, silent, with no request and no thanksgiving and not even a complaint. It would be, she thinks, a kind of insult. Better to stay away until she has something.
That was four years ago and she still has nothing.
She is fifty-two. She has been waiting to have something to say to God since she was forty-eight.
So let me ask you.
What if the silence is the prayer rather than the failure of it?
The silence is the posture
There is a psalm that opens on a word most translations have to explain in a footnote, and the word is stillness or silence, and it is the first thing in the sentence.
Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from him.Psalm 62:1
The Hebrew opening is closer to: only toward God is my soul silent.
Silence is not what happened when the psalm failed. It is the state the psalmist is describing as the right one. The waiting, wordless, still.
Psalm 62 makes silence toward God the posture of the soul rather than the absence of prayer, and the Spirit who gave that psalm put the stillness at the front of the sentence, so having no words has never once meant having nothing to bring.
Now, quietly, because you are not somebody who needs volume.
I understand the fear about turning up empty. It is not laziness and it is not indifference. It is a species of respect, and it is the same respect that made you articulate for ten years.
But look at what it has produced. Four years of staying away out of politeness.
Psalm 62 has a soul present and silent at the same time, in the same verse, and the Spirit was in that quiet presence, which means arriving with nothing has never once been the insult you have been protecting Him from.
And notice the second half, because it tells you why the silence is not empty.
My salvation comes from him. The stillness is not a void. It is the posture of somebody who has stopped generating and is waiting on somebody else to act.
That is not nothing. That is a very particular something, and you cannot do it while talking.
Psalm 62 pairs the silence with an expectation of God acting rather than with resignation, and the Spirit put those two halves together, so a wordless minute has never once been a minute in which nothing is happening.
Now the turn, and it requires no vocabulary at all.
Turn up with nothing, on purpose.
Not because you have found something to say. Because you have not, and because the not-having is now the honest thing to bring, and because it turns out to be an acceptable thing to bring.
You are not lowering a standard. You are correcting an idea about what the standard was.
Psalm 62 opens with a soul silent toward God and calls it rest, and the Spirit was in that stillness rather than in any sentence, so bringing nothing has never once been arriving empty.
Four years of waiting to have something. One silent minute.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Silence, you are what I have read as having nothing to bring and the psalm made you the posture. Psalm 62 opens with a soul silent toward God and calls that rest rather than absence.
- Politeness that says turning up empty handed would be worse than staying away, you have kept me four years from a door I never had to bring anything to, and in the name of Jesus you are finished. The Spirit was in that quiet presence and in the waiting itself.
- Lord, Psalm 62 pairs the silence with salvation coming from You, so the stillness was never a void. I am kneeling for one minute today and saying nothing at all, and I do not have to find words before I am allowed to be here.
Psalm 62:1
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