I Have Never Been Quiet in Front of Him

You can pray for forty minutes. You have done it. You could do it now, out loud, with three people listening, and it would be good and it would be true.

You pray in the car, in the kitchen, on the way to the shop. Somebody rings with something and you pray with them on the phone before you have thought about it.

Thirty years of that. It is not a performance and nobody thinks it is.

And here is the thing you have never once done.

Stopped, in front of Him, and stayed there.

Not stopped and got on with something. Stopped, and remained, and said nothing, and let the silence go on past the point where it is comfortable.

You tried it once, years ago, at a thing where somebody led it. Four seconds in, something in you started supplying words, and you let it, and the whole exercise turned into a very quiet prayer, which is not the same activity at all.

You would not describe this as a lack. Your prayer life is full. It is one of the good things in you and everybody around you benefits from it.

But there is a half of it that has never happened, and you know that, because the four seconds are still there and you still cannot get past them.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you the words were wrong. They were not. There is a strain of teaching that treats fluent prayer as shallow and silence as deep, and it is a snobbery, and it has made a great many people who talk to God easily feel that they are doing it badly.

I am not going to give you a contemplative technique with stages. That would be another thing to do well, and you would do it well, and it would become another activity you are good at. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Psalm 62:1, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

And I am not going to tell you that God has been waiting for silence in order to speak. He speaks in a great many ways and He has been speaking to you for thirty years, and a considerable amount of what you have said to other people came from somewhere. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 62:1, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

What I am going to do is name what the four seconds are, because they are the whole of this.

You are not doing prayer wrongly. Scripture says pray without ceasing, 1 Thessalonians 5:17, and it is an instruction toward more rather than toward less, and the Holy Spirit is present in a hall with a woman who has been praying since she was nineteen.

The verse has the missing half in it

There is a line at the start of Psalm 62 that is short and strange in the older translations.

Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation.Psalm 62:1

The Hebrew underneath waiteth carries the sense of silence. Some translations render it my soul is silent toward God, and the two ideas sit together in the one word: waiting and being quiet are the same posture.

That is the thing you have never done. Not because you are shallow, but because your entire relationship with God has been conducted in the active voice, and this word is passive. It is written, in Psalm 62:1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

And look at the second half. From him cometh my salvation. The direction of travel in that sentence is toward the person praying. Something is coming from Him to them.

That is what the silence is for. Not to impress anybody, not to be a deeper kind of Christian. It is the posture of somebody expecting something to arrive, and a person who is talking is not in a position to notice an arrival.

You are not missing something you have failed at. Scripture says truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation, Psalm 62:1, and the waiting is described as silence rather than as inactivity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings something to a person who has stopped supplying.

What is in the four seconds

Let me say what happens at second four, because you have never examined it and it will not survive being looked at. Scripture settles that in Psalm 62:1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

The silence arrives, and something in you becomes uneasy, and words come up to fill it.

That is not a spiritual failure. It is what happens to anybody who has spent thirty years experiencing prayer as production. If prayer is what you say, then silence is prayer not happening, and a gap in it feels like failure, and the words arrive to rescue you from failing.

And there is a second thing in the four seconds, which is harder.

When you are talking, you are the one shaping the encounter. You decide what is raised, in what order, and how it is framed. When you stop, you are not in charge of what comes up, and what comes up is not always what you would have chosen. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 62:1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

That is why the four seconds are uncomfortable. Not because God is far away in them. Because you are not steering.

You are not required to hold the shape of it. Scripture says be still, and know that I am God, Psalm 46:10, and the stillness is named as the condition for the knowing rather than as an achievement, and the Holy Spirit is at work in the part of an encounter that a person is not steering.

Two minutes, timed

The practical part is small and specific, and it has to be timed, because you will otherwise finish at about eleven seconds and believe it was two minutes.

Sit down. Set something for two minutes. Say one sentence to open it, if you need to, and then stop.

Words will come. That is not a failure of the exercise; that is the exercise. Do not follow them. Do not develop them into a prayer, however good they are, and some of them will be good, because you are fluent and fluency does not switch off. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 62:1, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

Let them go past and stay in the silence.

Two minutes is a very long time for somebody in your position and there is no virtue in making it ten. Two, daily, for a fortnight, and you will find that the four seconds have become about forty.

You are not going to be graded on how well you do this. Scripture says the Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him, Habakkuk 2:20, and the silence is a response to who is present rather than a discipline being scored, and the Holy Spirit is not assessing anybody's stillness.