The Same Prayer Since He Was Nineteen

He was nineteen the first time he prayed about it properly, and he can still see the room.

A student room, a desk with somebody else's initials scratched into it, the sound of a corridor. He knelt down, which he had never done on his own before, and he said the thing out loud, and he meant every syllable of it, and he genuinely believed that would be the end of the story.

He is forty now. He has a good life, a real faith, a shelf of books he has actually read. And the thing is still there.

Not roaring. That is what makes it so hard to describe to anybody. It is not a crisis and it has never once ruined him publicly. It is a small persistent pull that comes back on ordinary weeks, and he goes down to it, not always, not even often now, and afterwards he sits with the particular tiredness of a man who has been asking for the same thing for twenty one years.

He has prayed about it in every register he knows. He has prayed the disciplined prayers with a book open. He has prayed on aeroplanes and in a car outside his own house. He has prayed in the tradition he loves, with the words other people wrote, because sometimes other people's words are the only ones that will hold. And he has prayed the short ugly ones at two in the morning that are really just please.

And a friend he trusts entirely, over lunch, said the obvious kind thing: have you ever fasted about it?

He said he would consider it. He has considered nothing else. And underneath a question asked in real friendship, what he heard was that after twenty one years there was still a thing he had not tried, and therefore that the delay had been, in some quiet way, his own account.

If you have a prayer older than your adult life, sit down here with me a while.

Nobody up there is scoring the attempts

Deal with that before anything else, or every paragraph that follows will land on a shoulder that is already braced.

You have not prayed this badly and you are not being kept waiting while heaven listens for a better sentence. That is not a courtesy extended to a tired man over lunch. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been carrying twenty one years of repeated asking into a place your vocabulary was never going to reach.

Something happens to a person who prays about himself for a very long time. The desire to be free does not fade. It has nowhere to go, so it turns into audit. Prayer stops being a conversation and becomes an inspection you conduct on yourself every morning. And then a friend, meaning nothing but good, hands you one more instrument.

What God actually knows about the material

There is a verse that says something about God's knowledge of us that most of us would never dare say about ourselves.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

Take the two verbs slowly. Knows. Remembers.

He is not being informed by your twenty one years. He was not surprised in the student room and He has not been revising His opinion since. The psalm is saying that the fragility is not news to Him, that He holds it in mind deliberately, and that His patience is built on accurate information rather than on low expectations.

You are known, right down to the material, and you were never being graded on the strength of it. I am not offering that as consolation over a cup of tea: it is what the psalm states about God's own posture toward dust (Psalm 103:14), and it is His Spirit, not this paragraph, who turns it from a line you can translate into a floor you can stand on.

So what is fasting, then, if it is not the instrument that finally settles a man's oldest problem?

The definition, kept small on purpose

Fasting is not a payment. It is not leverage, it is not the missing piece, and it is not a report submitted to a God who had not been told about you. It is the body brought into a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and sits up at two in the morning, turning toward God with nothing in his hands.

There is no plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to work up to and nothing to complete. A plan is precisely what would turn this back into a transaction, and a transaction is the very thing that has been quietly grinding you down since you were nineteen.

Now a matter that belongs in the open rather than in a footnote. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a difficult relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not held at a greater distance from God by a medical instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can hold, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and telephone somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a detour around God. That is help He has put in the world on purpose.