Beautiful in the Room, Silent in the Car

People thank him for it afterwards, which is the part that has become difficult.

Rafiq prays well out loud. That is not vanity, it is simply true, and it has been true since he was about twenty-four. He has a way of gathering a room, of finding the sentence that everybody was already feeling, of not going on too long. There is a woman in his group who has told him twice that she started praying out loud herself because of the way he does it.

He is thirty-seven now.

And in September, driving back from an evening where three people had thanked him, he tried to work out when he had last said anything to God on his own, and he could not find it.

Not that week. Not the week before. He kept going back and there was a morning about a fortnight earlier where he had said something in the shower, briefly, and before that he genuinely could not say.

A fortnight, at least. Possibly longer.

He pulled in and sat with the engine off for a while, because that arithmetic is not survivable at speed.

He is not a fraud. That was the first thing he checked and it is worth saying plainly. Every word he says in those rooms is true and he means all of it and he is not performing. If anything, he means it more in the room than he manages to mean anything on his own.

That is precisely the problem, and he can see the mechanism.

Praying in a room has an audience and a shape and a job. It has a beginning because somebody says Rafiq, would you, and it has an end because a room can feel one. It is, in a real sense, a craft, and he has spent thirteen years getting good at it.

Praying alone in a car has none of that. No shape, no start, no end, nobody to gather. And it turns out that a man can become extremely competent at the first and lose the second entirely without anything visible going wrong, and without anybody, including himself, noticing for a fortnight.

Or longer. He still does not know how long.

And you may know this. You may be good at the public version of something and have quietly stopped doing the private one, and the applause makes it almost impossible to see.

The room He recommended has a door on it

Take this off before we go any further, because you have been carrying it since September and it was never yours.

You are not a hypocrite. You never were. Scripture never once treats a gift for public prayer as evidence against a man, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the shape of the room, who meets anybody who prays anywhere. Set that down here in the car. It is heavy and it has been sitting in the passenger seat since that evening.

Now hear the instruction, and notice how domestic it is.

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.Matthew 6:6

A room. A door. Nobody there.

He is not condemning public prayer, because He prayed publicly Himself and taught people to pray together. He is naming a second room, and He is naming it because a man can live entirely in the first one without noticing.

And there is no craft in the second room. That is the point of it. There is no gathering to do, nobody to serve, no sentence to find that everybody was already feeling. There is a man and a door and God.

You have access to that room. Right now, with the engine off. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who meets a person there, and He has never once required the sentence to be good.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on this side of the road too.

Nothing here says your thirteen years of praying in rooms were false or that the woman who started praying because of you was fooled. That is a real gift and it has done real good and Scripture does not sneer at it. Keep it. Keep doing it.

And nothing here says the culture around it is the problem. The phrases you use in that room are not lies. They are a shared language, and shared languages exist because they work, and you belong in that room and you were right to learn its speech, and His Spirit uses it.

The point is only that fluency in one room has quietly substituted for presence in the other, and that substitution is silent, which is why fifteen years can go past.

Here is the tender part. What is actually stopping you in the car is not laziness.

It is that you do not know how to pray badly any more. You have been good at this for thirteen years, and in a room with a door on it there is nothing to be good at, and a man who has been fluent for that long finds his own clumsiness genuinely unbearable.

You are able to be clumsy. Scripture puts the reward on the secret and not on the wording, and His Spirit is the one who meets you there, and neither of them ever asked for a well made sentence.