He Has Not Prayed Since the Funeral

He sits down at the kitchen table at about twenty to midnight, the way he has most nights for seven weeks, and puts both hands flat on the wood.

The house is quiet in the particular way a house is quiet when it used to have more noise in it. The refrigerator ticks. There is a coat on the hook by the back door that he has taken down twice and both times put back.

He gets as far as the word God.

That is where it stops. Every night, the same place, like a needle coming off a record. He can say the word. He cannot say the sentence that comes after it, because he knows exactly what the sentence is. He has known since about the second week.

It is four words long. It is not a question, whatever it looks like written down. It is an accusation, and he is not willing to stand in his own kitchen and hear his own voice say it.

So he sits there with his hands on the table until it is late enough to go to bed without lying awake, and then he goes up.

He still goes on Sunday. He stands when everyone stands, and he knows the words to most of it, and his mouth moves and there is nothing behind it. Afterward a kind man shakes his hand in the doorway and asks how he is doing, and he says yes, thank you, getting there. He is not getting anywhere.

What nobody in that doorway knows is that he has not said one private word to God since the day of the funeral. Not one. Not in the car, not in the hospital parking lot, not at three in the morning. Seven weeks of complete silence from a man who used to pray while he was shaving.

You know this. Maybe it was not a funeral. Maybe it was a diagnosis, or a court date, or the afternoon somebody told you what had been happening for years while you were making excuses for it. Maybe you still pray out loud in front of people and have said nothing real since March. Maybe your sentence is four words and maybe it is one.

Three things before anything else.

I am not going to correct you. Not the anger, not the accusation, not the tone of it. You have not been assigned a chaplain to talk you out of how you feel about God this week.

I am not going to defend Him to you. He has not asked me to and He does not need it, and a person who is busy defending God has stopped listening to the man in front of him.

And I am not going to answer why. I do not know. Nobody who tells you they do is telling you the truth, and I would rather sit at this table with you and say I do not know than hand you something tidy at twenty to midnight.

The psalm that never gets better

There is a psalm in the middle of the book that most people have never had read to them, and there is a reason for that.

It is written by a man called Heman the Ezrahite, and it is the only psalm in the collection that does not turn. Every other one that starts in the dark finds a hinge somewhere: nevertheless, and yet, but I will trust. This one never does. It gets worse, and then it stops.

He tells God the pit is the lowest one there is. He says God's anger lies hard on him. He asks, straight out, why his soul is being cast off. And the last word of the psalm, in the Hebrew, is darkness.

That is where it ends. No resolution. No hinge.

O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee.Psalm 88:1

You are holding a sentence that God kept a whole song of in His own book. That is not me being clever with a text. Psalm 88 was preserved, given a tune and a choir instruction, and sung out loud in public worship without an edit, and it is the Holy Spirit who carried that psalm into Scripture rather than quietly leaving it out.

Think about who decided that. Somebody could have trimmed it, or added four lines at the end to make it usable. Nobody did.

You have not been disqualified by the sentence you will not say. The written word puts a man's accusation into the hymnbook of the people of God, unanswered, and His Spirit is the one who makes that mean something to a man sitting in a quiet kitchen rather than staying a fact about ancient literature.

You were never once corrected for it, and Scripture does not go back and soften Heman into somebody easier to be around. What is written leaves the complaint standing at full strength, and the same Spirit who inspired the psalm is in the room where the coat is still on the hook.

What the first line is doing

Look at how the psalm opens, because it is the most important thing in it.

O LORD God of my salvation.

He is not talking about God. He is talking to Him. Everything that follows, every accusation, every question with an edge on it, is aimed directly at a Person who is being addressed by name.

That is not disrespect. That is the last rope in the boat, and Heman has both hands on it.

Which means the silence at that table, the word God and then nothing after it, is not the reverent option. It is the further one. A man shouting is closer than a man being polite by saying nothing at all.

You are not required to feel differently before you are allowed to speak. Nothing in what is written makes access conditional on a settled heart, and the Holy Spirit is described as the one who carries a groan that has no words in it yet, which is not a description of somebody who needs the wording tidied first.

I am not telling you to pray. I am telling you what the book does with a man who says the worst sentence he has: it writes it down, gives it a tune, and hands it to the choir.

You have a hearing that does not close when the tone changes. Psalm 88:1 addresses Him as the God of salvation in the same breath that begins an eighteen verse complaint, and it is His Spirit who keeps a person in the room when everything in them wants to leave it.