I Only Pray in Front of People

You did it on Thursday and it was good. Not performed; you meant it. You prayed for the woman whose mother is ill and you used her mother's name, and you did not do the thing where people pray at each other, and somebody said afterwards that it had helped.

You will do it again on Sunday. You will do it at the meal on Wednesday if you are asked, and you will be asked.

And you have not prayed on your own since some time in the spring.

Not zero: you say things in the car, occasionally, in a general direction. But sitting down, or standing, or kneeling, on your own, with nobody there and no reason to except that you wanted to, has not happened in months.

Here is what makes it difficult to think about clearly, and it is why you have never quite dealt with it.

The public praying is not fake. That is what you keep testing it against, and it passes. You mean every word, you are not showing off, and it genuinely helps people.

So there is nothing to repent of, which means there is nothing to fix, which means it has gone on since the spring.

But it is still true that you only do it when somebody is listening, and you know that, and you have known it since about June.

What this page will not do

I am not going to call you a hypocrite. That word means saying what you do not mean, and you mean it, and using it here would be inaccurate and would send you off in the wrong direction entirely.

I am not going to tell you to stop praying publicly. People are genuinely helped by it, and pulling out of it in a fit of self-suspicion would take something real away from a room.

And I am not going to give you a method or a schedule. You would keep it for eleven days.

What I am going to do is name what the private thing is for, because I think you have half assumed it is the same activity done in a smaller room, and it is not.

You are not a fraud for being good at this in public. Scripture says the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and He has been reading yours on every Thursday rather than the room's reaction, and the Holy Spirit is in an empty hall with a man who has just put the chairs away.

The verse is somebody with nobody there

There is a line at the start of Psalm 63 that is written from a very specific location.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.Psalm 63:1

Look at the setting. A dry and thirsty land, where no water is. He is in a wilderness. There is no congregation, no room, nobody to be helped by anything he says.

And the first four words are the whole point: O God, thou art my God.

Not our God. Not the God of this people. My God, said by one man with nobody there to hear him say it.

That is the thing you have not done since the spring. Not prayer in general; you do a great deal of that. The specific act of addressing Him as yours, when there is no room and no benefit and nobody will know whether you did. Scripture settles that in Psalm 63:1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

And notice the language he uses. Thirsteth. Longeth. Those are appetite words, and appetite is what a person feels for something they need for themselves rather than something they are administering for others.

You are not disqualified from that by being useful in public. Scripture says O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee, Psalm 63:1, and it is said in a wilderness by somebody with no audience at all, and the Holy Spirit is present in a room where nothing is being achieved for anybody.

The two activities

Here is the distinction, and once it is clear the fix is obvious.

Public prayer is ministry. It is a thing done for other people, in words chosen so that a room can follow, at a pace that carries fourteen people who are not inside your head. It is genuinely prayer and it is also work, and doing it well takes skill and attention.

Private prayer is not a smaller version of that. It is a different activity: nothing is being carried, nobody is following, and the words do not have to be usable by anybody else.

You have been doing a great deal of the first and calling it the whole thing, and that is why nothing has felt wrong: you are praying regularly, you mean it, the tank looks full. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 63:1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

But the two feed different things. The first feeds a room. The second feeds the man doing the first, and it is the only thing that does, and it has not happened since the spring.

You are not currently being fed by any of it. Scripture says man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, Matthew 4:4, and living by it is a first-person activity rather than a distributive one, and the Holy Spirit is not fed to a man through the room he is serving.

Why it is harder

Say the honest thing, because it will remove the mystery.

In public you know it is working. You can see it. Somebody's face changes, somebody says thank you, and the whole thing has a shape with a beginning and an end.

Alone, none of that exists. You start, and there is no feedback, and after ninety seconds you cannot tell whether anything is happening, and a man who is used to knowing whether a thing landed finds that intolerable.

So you stop. Not deliberately; you just do not start again the next day.

That is not a spiritual failure. It is a person who is good at a public version of something finding the private version unbearably unmeasurable.

And the answer is not to make it measurable. It is to do it while it stays unmeasurable, which is what it is going to be for a while.

You are not doing it wrong when it produces nothing. Scripture says be still, and know that I am God, Psalm 46:10, and the stillness is named as the condition rather than as an achievement to be evaluated, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting to see whether a man can tell it worked.