An Hour of Walking and Nothing Said

He leaves the house at ten to eight, the same as always, and turns left up the hill road.

Cattle grid. The gatepost with the wire wound round the top of it. The place where the tarmac gives up and goes to gravel for about forty yards for no reason anybody has ever explained. Then the long pull where it steepens, and then the bend, and then the level bit where you can turn round and see the lights of the town coming on one street at a time.

Fifty minutes up. Twenty-five back down, because down is quicker.

He has walked that road every evening for nine years, and for nine years he prayed the whole way. Out loud, mostly. Under his breath at the bend where the houses are, and properly out loud above that. Nothing impressive. The kids. The work. The neighbor with the bad hip. Thank You for this, sort this out, I do not know what to do about that.

Six weeks ago something happened, and he still leaves at ten to eight, and he still turns left, and he says nothing at all.

Not out of protest. He is not staging anything. He opens his mouth in the usual place, above the gravel, where he has opened his mouth several thousand times, and nothing arrives.

So he counts things instead. Fence posts. The two gates. How many cars pass, which is usually one and sometimes none.

And on the way back down, at the cattle grid, the thought comes that he cannot get rid of. Is this still praying? Or did it stop being praying six weeks ago, and nobody told me, and I have been walking up an empty hill in the dark like a man going to a job that has already let him go?

That is you.

Maybe not a hill road. Maybe the drive to work with the radio off. Maybe the ten minutes sitting on the edge of the bed with your shoes in your hand. Maybe the place in the car park where you used to sit for a minute before going in.

You go. You keep going. And nothing comes out of you, and you have started to keep score of the silence, and the score is frightening.

Two things before we go any further. What has happened to you is not a failure of faith. And I am not going to explain it to you, or tell you what God is doing with it, because I do not know, and I am not willing to invent something and let you build on it.

There is a psalm in the book from a man who could not speak

Psalm 77 is written by Asaph, and I want you to hear the first four verses the way they actually go, without the tidying up they usually get.

He says he sought God in the day of his trouble. Good so far. Then he says his soul refused to be comforted. Refused. That is an active verb about his own soul, and he wrote it down about himself, and did not take it out.

Then it gets worse. He says he remembered God and was troubled by it. Remembering God made him feel worse, and that sentence is in the Bible.

I remembered God, and was troubled: I complained, and my spirit was overwhelmed. Selah. Thou holdest mine eyes waking: I am so troubled that I cannot speak.Psalm 77:3 to 4

Read the last two clauses again. He tells God that God is the one keeping him awake at night. That is not a compliment. That is an accusation, made to His face, in the second person.

And then: I am so troubled that I cannot speak.

You are in company you did not know you had, and the company is inside the songbook and not outside it. Psalm 77:4 is a man reporting to God that he has run out of words, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that the report was kept, set to music and handed to a choir director rather than quietly dropped.

Sit with that a moment. Somebody read a man's inability to speak, and wrote a tune for it, and taught it to a choir, and it has been sung for three thousand years.

You have not fallen out of the category of people God keeps, and nothing in these six weeks has moved you out of it. What is written in Psalm 77 preserves the complaint word for word, which is God's own way of saying He is not embarrassed by it, and His Spirit is the one holding a person steady inside a psalm like that.

And notice what nobody does to Asaph anywhere in that psalm. Nobody corrects him. There is no note in the margin, no gentle rebuke, no later verse explaining that he did not really mean it.

You are not being corrected here either, and the hard sentence you have been carrying up that hill does not put you on the wrong side of anything. Psalm 77 keeps the complaint and never once attaches a reprimand to it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a person rather than leaving it sitting there as information.

Fifty minutes is not nothing, whatever the score says

Here is where the wrong sentence usually arrives, so let me put the right one in its place first.

Nobody is going to tell you to pray harder. Nobody is going to suggest that the silence is a signal about the state of your heart, or a consequence of something, or a lesson in learning to listen. I do not know that it is any of those, and neither does anybody else, and a man walking a hill in the dark should not have to carry somebody else's theory as well.

What I will say is this. For six weeks now, every evening, a man has gone up that road with nothing at all to bring. That is not absence. That is turning up.

And there is a verse written for exactly this gap. Paul writes that we do not know what to pray for as we ought, and that the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered.

Cannot be uttered. Not "difficult to phrase". Unable to be said.

You are being prayed for from inside your own silence, and the praying does not stop when your voice does. Romans 8:26 puts the intercession in the Spirit's hands precisely for people who have run out of words, which means the fifty minutes has been full the whole time you thought it was empty.

That is the shape of it. The gap between what a man needs to say and what a man is able to say is not an emergency, and it is not a gap he was ever expected to close on his own.

You were accompanied on every one of those forty-two evenings, including the ones where you counted fence posts. The written word never once makes the quality of a man's speech the condition of God's attention, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting at the top of the hill for you to say something worth hearing. He walks up.