Two Hours In A Building And Nothing Over A Saucepan

She can pray for two hours. That is not a figure of speech.

She has done it more times than she could count. In a room with other people, out loud, at volume, with things happening, and she is not tired at the end of it and she has never once run out of words in that building in nineteen years.

And she stood at her own hob on a Tuesday with a wooden spoon and could not say four words.

There was nothing wrong. That is what made it strange. Nobody was ill, nothing was in crisis, it was a normal evening and she was making something out of a tin because she could not be bothered, and she thought: I should say something.

And nothing came.

She tried, actually tried, standing there, and her own kitchen felt like a room where that was not done. Like speaking in a library. And she heard herself think, and she has not been able to unhear it: this is not the place for that.

Nineteen years of praying in one building. She could not name a single time she had spoken to God out loud in that kitchen, and she has lived there eleven years.

You know that hob.

Maybe you can pray in a group and go silent alone. Maybe you can lead and cannot mutter. Maybe your car is fine and your kitchen is not, or your kitchen is fine and your bedroom is not, and you have never asked why the map of your own house has rooms marked off.

Nobody drew that map on purpose. It gets drawn by where a person first learned to do a thing, and a habit that started in a hall stays shaped like a hall for a very long time.

Read where the prayer goes

Here is a verse about food, and it is startling how directly it lands on a woman with a wooden spoon.

For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.1 Timothy 4:4-5

Sanctified by the word of God and prayer.

Read what is being sanctified. Not a service. Not a building. Food. Dinner. A tin of something on a Tuesday.

And read what does it. The word of God and prayer, which is to say the two things you have been keeping for that hall, applied here, to a pan, by a person standing at a hob.

You are holding the two things that sanctify an ordinary meal, and neither of them was ever confined to a building. That is what the verse puts directly over food, the word and prayer (1 Timothy 4:4-5), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who dwells in a person rather than in a room, which means both of those things have been walking into your kitchen with you every evening for eleven years.

The gap is a habit, not a fault

Now let me be careful, because you are already halfway to concluding something about your own heart and it is not true.

You are not a hypocrite. Your two hours are real. Nothing that happens in that building is performance and nobody who has been in a room with you would suggest it.

What has happened is that a capacity got trained in one place. You learned to pray in a hall with other people and volume and a particular sound, and the whole apparatus, including your body, associates praying with those conditions, and a wooden spoon does not meet a single one of them.

You have not been faking anything, and the silence at your hob is a habit rather than a report on your soul. Scripture says the LORD looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who does the searching there, gently, and He is not standing in your kitchen comparing your Tuesday to your Sunday.

And there is no method being handed over here. You are not being given a practice, and there is no correct way to speak in your own house. The word says when ye pray, use not vain repetitions (Matthew 6:7), which is a warning against trusting a form at all, and His Spirit is the one who makes any words into prayer, including badly chosen ones over a tin.

What one sentence does

Here is the mechanism, and it is smaller than you would like it to be.

A room that has never heard you is not resisting you. It is simply blank. Your kitchen has no rule about this in it. There is no atmosphere in there that has to be overcome, and the reason it felt like a library is that libraries are quiet because everybody agrees to be quiet, and you have been the only person in that agreement.

One sentence ends it. Not a devotional life. Not a new habit at six in the morning. One sentence, said out loud, in that room, and the room has heard you and cannot un-hear you.

You are able to speak there, and one sentence out loud is enough to end eleven years of a rule nobody made. Scripture says whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31), and it is the Holy Spirit who is present in the whatsoever, which is the widest word in the sentence and deliberately so.