Mine Do Not Sound Like Theirs

She stopped praying out loud in that hall about five years ago and nobody noticed, which she is glad about and which also tells you something.

It was not a decision either. It was a slow retreat over a couple of years, until she got to the point where, when it goes round, she says amen at the right moments and does not add anything, and everybody assumes she is quiet by temperament, and she is not quiet by temperament at all; she talks all day at work.

The reason is that hers do not sound like theirs.

She can describe the difference exactly. When Ancilla prays there are three or four Scriptures woven into it and it builds and it lands somewhere, and when Devon prays it is short and it has a kind of authority in it and everybody in that room feels it.

Hers are: her niece's name, and please, and I do not know what to do, and sometimes just the name three or four times because the rest of it will not come.

She is fifty-two, and the niece is twenty-three and in something bad, and Beverley has prayed for her every day for four years in a way she is ashamed of.

That is the actual sentence. She is ashamed of her praying, and she thinks it is not the kind that does anything, and so she does it privately and briefly and gets on, and has quietly concluded that the girl needs somebody better praying for her than what she has got.

If you have decided yours are the wrong kind, hear the question. Which verse said the sound was the qualification?

What James grounds it in

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.James 5:16

Now, the phrase people quote is effectual fervent, and Beverley has heard it and has understood it to mean prayers like Devon's, with heat and force in them, and hers are not that.

But look at the actual grammar of the sentence, because the qualifier is not attached to where she thinks.

Of a righteous man. That is the qualifier. It is the person, not the performance. The verse does not say the eloquent prayer, or the loud one, or the well-constructed one. It grounds the availing in what the person is, and what the person is, in Christ, is not a matter of their vocabulary.

And what a person in Christ is, is righteous, not by their own manufacture but by His.

You are the righteous person that verse is about, and it is already His righteousness rather than your delivery, and the qualification was never the sound. I am not flattering a woman about her praying. It is written in James 5:16, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence about who prays rather than how and lays it in a doorway on a wet evening.

Then he picks his example

And here is the part that finishes the argument, and Beverley has never read it because the quotable bit ends before it.

The very next verse says: Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly.

James picks the most spectacular pray-er in the Old Testament, a man who called down fire and stopped the rain for three and a half years, and the first thing he says about him is that he was a man of the same nature as the rest of us. Subject to like passions. Ordinary in his material.

That is not a small editorial choice. James could have used Elijah as a standard to reach for. He uses him as proof that the standard is not a standard, because the man who did those things was made of exactly what Beverley is made of, and James says so explicitly before he says another word about him.

You are the same material as the man James chose for his example, and that is already the point he was making. Scripture says Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that clause in front of the impressive part on purpose.

What her praying actually is

And now let me say what those four years have been, because she has been describing them wrongly.

A name, repeated, because the rest will not come. Please. I do not know what to do.

That is not a failed version of Ancilla's prayer. That is a specific and ancient kind of praying, and it is all over the Psalms, and it is what the Bible sounds like when somebody is at the end of themselves rather than in front of a room. How long, O LORD. Out of the depths have I cried. Those are not eloquent, they are not constructed, and they are Scripture.

And Romans says that when we do not know what to pray as we ought, the Spirit Himself makes intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered (Romans 8:26). Which describes, almost exactly, a woman who can only get the name out.

You are praying in a shape the word describes rather than one it disqualifies, and the Spirit is already carrying what will not come. It is written that the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that in a woman who has been ashamed of the sound of her own voice.