It Felt Manufactured

Ross was told what to do and he did it and it worked, and he has never been able to decide what that means.

He was forty. There had been a conversation, and a man he trusted had explained, kindly and without any pressure, that sometimes a person simply has to begin. That the sound does not arrive fully formed. That you open your mouth and offer what you have and it comes.

And Ross, who had wanted this for about nine years without ever saying so, went home and did exactly that.

It worked. It has gone on working for eleven years, and he uses it most days, and it has been genuinely useful to him in ways he could describe if anybody asked.

And he has never once been able to shake the question.

Because he was told what to do, and he did it, and something happened. Which means he cannot separate the thing from the instruction, and he cannot rule out that what he has is a technique he was taught by a helpful man in 2014 rather than something given.

He is fifty-one, and it does not trouble him constantly. It surfaces about twice a year, and he has never mentioned it to anybody including the man who taught him, who is still alive and who would be distressed to know.

You may know that evening.

Maybe somebody explained it to you too. Maybe it worked. And maybe you have never been able to work out whether being coached into something disqualifies it.

Where the interceding is located

There is a verse in Romans that describes what is happening in prayer at the point where a person's own capacity gives out, and the whole question of who is doing what is settled in it.

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.Romans 8:26

The Spirit itself maketh intercession.

The interceding is His. Not assisted by Him, not enabled by Him, not made possible by Him and then performed by the person. His, as the subject of the verb.

And notice the phrase before it: we know not what we should pray for as we ought. The situation being described is one where human capacity has run out, which is precisely where you were at forty after nine years of wanting something and not having it.

Which means the question you have been unable to answer for eleven years is asking about the wrong agent. You have been trying to establish whether the sound was produced by you or given to you, and the verse locates the interceding in Him regardless of what your mouth was doing.

And the interceding is His and it was never yours to produce or to fake. The written word makes the Spirit the subject of the verb rather than the assistant, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been trying to establish an origin for eleven years.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word describes exactly the position of somebody whose own capacity has given out, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than auditing how a thing began.

What you have been requiring of it

Now the requirement, because it is unstated and it is what has kept this open.

You have been requiring that a genuine thing must arrive unprompted.

That is the hidden premise. If it had come with no instruction, in a room with nobody talking, you would have been satisfied. Because it followed a conversation, you cannot be.

But almost nothing in a life works that way, including things nobody doubts. Somebody taught you to read. Somebody told you how to swim and then you swam. Every skill and most of the important human capacities arrive through a person explaining, and nobody concludes that reading is therefore a technique rather than a real thing you can do.

The instruction and the reality are not competitors. A man can be told how to begin and the thing that follows can still be entirely real, and this is the ordinary way that almost everything is transmitted.

And being taught how to begin does not settle anything about what began. The word records people receiving through the hands and words of others constantly, and never once treats the human involvement as evidence against, and the Spirit is the one who makes that reach a man who has been treating a conversation as a contaminant.

And nothing about you is under review for having wanted it for nine years. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to somebody who has never mentioned this to the man who helped him.

And nothing here rules on the coaching

Let me be plain about what this article is not doing.

I am not going to adjudicate whether people should be taught to begin. There are serious people on both sides of that, some of whom think the coaching is helpful and some of whom think it manufactures things, and I am not settling it in a paragraph and this site is not where that gets settled.

What I will say is that the argument, whichever way it goes, is not your question. Your question is about eleven years of your own prayer life, and that is answerable without settling anything general.

Eleven years. Most days. Genuinely useful in ways you could describe.

Whatever anybody thinks about the method, that is not the description of a technique somebody is performing at himself. Techniques wear out. They do not survive eleven years of daily use in a private life with nobody watching.

And you are not required to settle a general argument to be settled about your own eleven years. The word says by their fruits ye shall know them, which points at what a thing has done rather than at how it started, and the Spirit is the one who makes an outward test available where an inward one has failed twice a year for a decade.