Which Prayer Is He Hearing

The social part he has made his peace with. It is the prayer that has started to frighten him.

Because he prays two ways. Not two moods, two ways. Different words, a different posture, a different rhythm to the sentences, a different name for what he is doing.

In one room he prays the way that room prays, and he has done it since he was small, and the words come out of him in an order that was set long before he was born.

In the other room he prays the way that room prays, which he learned as an adult, which is warmer and more spontaneous and which he genuinely loves, and which uses none of the same shapes.

And both of them are real. That is the trouble. If one of them were a performance he would know what to do with it.

It came at him at four in the morning about a month ago. He was awake for no reason and he started to pray and he stopped after about six words, because he did not know which one he was doing.

And under that, the actual fear, the one that got him out of bed and down to the kitchen: which one is He listening to?

Because if one of these is the real one, then half of his praying life has been an accent, and he does not know which half, and he has been doing this for twenty two years.

You know that kitchen at four in the morning.

Maybe your split is between what you say aloud and what you say in your head. Maybe it is the prayer you pray in a room and the one you pray driving. Maybe you have two languages and He has only ever been addressed in one of them since you were a child.

There is no fault in this and there is nobody who did it to you. It is simply what happens to a person who has learned to pray twice: the two do not merge, and after enough years the seam between them starts to look like a question about God rather than a question about you.

The words were never the transmission

Here is a passage that answers this so directly that it is almost startling to read it with this question in your hand.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit.Romans 8:26-27

We know not what we should pray for as we ought.

That is not written about people with a two room problem. It is written about everybody, always, as a permanent condition of being human. Nobody has ever got the words right. Nobody.

And what happens instead is the mechanism in the next clause. The Spirit Himself makes intercession, with groanings which cannot be uttered, which means without words at all, and the One searching the heart reads the mind of the Spirit rather than reading your vocabulary.

So the transmission does not run on your words. It never did.

You are heard underneath the words, and neither of your two versions is the one He has been waiting for. That is what the passage says by putting the intercession below the level of utterance entirely (Romans 8:26-27), and it is the Holy Spirit who is named in it as the one doing the carrying, which means the question of which accent counts was answered before you learned either one.

Two prayers, one prayer

Now let us take the fear apart properly, because it deserves it.

Your fear has a hidden premise in it: that God receives prayer the way a machine receives a password, and that one of your two formats is the accepted one and the other returns an error.

That premise is not in the text anywhere. What the text describes is a Father who searches hearts, and a Spirit who translates from something deeper than language, and a Son who is described in the very next verse as making intercession as well.

Three of them are working on your six words. You are not the transmission engineer.

You have never once been responsible for the delivery of your own prayer. Scripture says he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit (Romans 8:27), and it is the Holy Spirit who is doing the interceding in that sentence, which is a job description that leaves you nothing to get wrong at four in the morning.

And both of your ways are real, and both of them have been arriving.

You have not spent half of your praying life in an accent, and nothing that went up out of either room fell short of anything. The word says the LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth (Psalm 145:18), and notice the condition is truth and not form, and His Spirit is the one who makes a thing true in a person, which He has been doing in both of your rooms for twenty two years.

And nobody here is prescribing a prayer

Let me say it plainly, because this is the exact place a page like this would overstep.

Nothing here tells you how to pray, which of your two ways to keep, whether to blend them, whether to drop one, or whether the older shapes or the newer ones are better. That is not being decided here in any direction and it never will be on this site.

Both ways of praying that you carry were given to you by people who loved God, and neither set of people was wrong to pray as they pray, and a page that ranked them would be doing something a great deal worse than leaving the question open.

You are not being handed a method, and no form of words is being recommended to you here. The word says when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking (Matthew 6:7), which is a warning against trusting the mechanism of the words at all, and His Spirit is the one who makes any words at all into prayer.