I Stopped Saying I Would Pray

Denise noticed it in about 2019 and made a decision and has kept it, and the decision has quietly cost her something she did not anticipate.

What she noticed was that she had been saying I will pray for you several times a week for about thirty years, and that she was not doing it.

Not never. She would pray for the ones that stayed with her, the serious ones, the people she loved. But the ordinary run of it, the woman at the checkout with the hospital appointment, the man at church whose mother was ill, the friend of a friend, all of those got the sentence and a good proportion of them did not get the prayer, and she found that out one afternoon by simply thinking about it.

So she stopped saying it.

She decided that if she was not going to do it she was not going to say it, and she has held that for six years, and she now says something warm and true instead, and only says the other thing when she is going to.

It was the right decision. She would make it again.

What she did not anticipate is what it has done to her sense of herself. Because every time she does not say it now, which is most times, she is aware of the fact that she is not saying it, and the not-saying has become a small regular reminder of the thirty years, and she has arrived at a settled private view of herself as somebody who talks about praying more than she prays.

She is fifty-two.

You may know that decision.

Maybe you also stopped saying it. Maybe you also did it for the right reason. And maybe you have found that the silence has become a running commentary.

The instruction is about plainness

There is a sentence in the Sermon on the Mount about speech, and it is the whole ground of what you did in 2019.

But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.Matthew 5:37

Yea, yea; Nay, nay.

The instruction is about the correspondence between what a person says and what is so. Not about being cautious, and not about saying less. About the two matching.

Which means what you did in 2019 was obedience to that sentence. You had noticed a gap between your speech and your practice, and you closed it, and the way you closed it was by making the speech true rather than by making promises you would then chase.

That is not a decline. It is the thing being asked for in that verse, done by somebody who noticed something about herself that most people never notice at all.

And what you did in 2019 was the instruction rather than a retreat from it. The written word makes plain correspondence the standard rather than volume of promising, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been reading her own silence as a verdict.

And healing is His and the asking is yours. The word puts the asking with you as the whole of your part, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than counting sentences you did not say.

The running commentary

Now the thing that has actually gone wrong, because it is not the decision and it is not the thirty years.

Every time you do not say it, you notice yourself not saying it.

That is what has turned a good decision into a daily reminder. The silence is not neutral for you; it carries a footnote, and the footnote says because of what you found out about yourself in 2019.

And a footnote repeated several times a week for six years does not stay a footnote. It becomes a description.

Which means the cost of the decision has been paid in a currency you never agreed to: not in fewer promises, but in a settled view of yourself as somebody whose words outrun her practice, held in place by the very discipline that was supposed to fix it.

And the correction was never meant to become a description of you. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who fixed something in 2019 and has been paying for it ever since.

And you are not somebody who talks about praying more than she prays. The word makes the standard a correspondence rather than a quantity, and by that standard you have been accurate for six years, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than sentencing you for the years before you noticed.

What the thirty years actually were

One more thing, about before 2019, because you have been harder on it than it deserves.

I will pray for you was not, for most of those thirty years, a promise you broke. It was, in the ordinary speech of the people around you, a way of saying I am sorry, and I am with you, and this matters to me.

That is what it means in most mouths in most conversations, and everybody involved knows it, and the woman at the checkout was not filing a claim.

You are the one who read it as a contract, which is why you were troubled by it and why almost nobody else is. And the sensitivity that made you notice is the same sensitivity that has made you unable to put it down.

I am not saying go back to the old habit. You have found something truer and it suits you. I am saying the thirty years were not thirty years of lying, and you have been sentencing yourself under a law that only you were applying.

And thirty years of a common phrase was not thirty years of breaking your word. The word says charity thinketh no evil, and the Spirit is the one who lets a woman extend to her own past the reading she would instantly extend to anybody else's.