Talking to the Chickens

Ola has not prayed out loud since 2014.

Not once. Not at the table, not at the bedside, not at her own husband's graveside, where her brother-in-law said the words and she stood there with her hands in front of her and her mouth shut.

It is not that she does not believe. Ola has believed her whole life and would tell you so without any fuss.

It is the first line.

Dear Lord sounds like a letter, and she is not writing a letter. Father God sounds like Brother Hollis, and she is not Brother Hollis and it sits wrong in her mouth. Almighty God she tried once in the kitchen and heard herself and had to sit down. And just saying Hey felt like walking into somebody's house without knocking.

So she gets stuck at the front door of it, every time, and after eleven years she has quit trying at the door.

But out in the yard, of an evening, with the coffee can of scratch feed on her hip, Ola talks.

She talks about the truck. She talks about Danny's hours getting cut and how he will not say a word about it and how she can tell by the way he eats. She talks about her knee. She talks about the girl at the pharmacy who has a hard look about her lately, and about whether it would be a kindness or an intrusion to ask.

She talks the whole time she is out there, in a low steady voice, to about nineteen hens who could not care less.

And this past September her sister-in-law June came round the corner of the shed to bring back a dish and stood there quiet for a good minute and a half without Ola knowing.

Then she said, "Ola."

And Ola about jumped out of her skin.

And June said, "Honey. Who do you reckon you have been talking to out here?"

Ola said she was just talking. Just talking to herself, mostly.

And June said, "No, you are not. I have been standing here. That was not talking to yourself. You have been praying every evening for eleven years and calling it feeding the chickens, and the only thing you have not done is start it."

Now, let me ask you.

How long since you started one out loud?

Because I would bet money you have not stopped talking to Him inside your head. All day, some of you. But the out-loud kind stalls at the front, because you cannot find an opening that does not sound like somebody else, and after a while a person stops walking up to a door they cannot get through.

The Spirit is already handling the wording

Paul says a thing in Romans 8 that ought to take the whole weight off you, and it is the plainest comfort in the letter.

In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.Romans 8:26

Read what he assumes about you.

We do not know how to pray as we should. That is not the failing of a beginner. That is Paul, the man who wrote most of the New Testament, putting himself in the sentence with the word we. Nobody knows how. That is the baseline condition of every praying person who has ever lived.

Groanings too deep for words. Which means the deepest praying that happens in you does not have words on it at all. Not bad words. No words. And it is not less prayer for that. It is the Spirit Himself doing it.

So hear this over you, out there in the yard with the feed can. You are already being prayed through, and the first line you have been stuck on for eleven years was never the entry requirement. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who is described as doing the work, which means the thing you thought you had failed at has been happening every single evening.

Now let me untangle the knot for you, because I have seen this one many times and it is nearly always the same knot.

You think the beginning is the doorway. It is not. The beginning is a convention.

There is not a single formula in Scripture for how to open your mouth to God. Hannah moved her lips and no sound came out and Eli thought she was drunk. David starts with a complaint about how long it is taking. Jonah prays from inside a fish and does not open with anything at all. The tax collector could not even lift his head and got eight words out and went home justified.

Not one of them started right, and every one of them was heard.

You are heard right now, in the middle of a sentence you have not begun, and the ordinary low voice you use out at the fence is a voice He knows better than the one you were trying to find. It is written down, and His Spirit is the one carrying it, and He is not standing at the front door waiting on a formula.

Let me guard this, since I would not want to be misheard.

The old forms are good. Our Father who art in heaven has carried more people through more nights than anything any of us will ever write, and there is nothing wrong with the way Brother Hollis prays. It is beautiful and it is his.

The trouble only starts when a form becomes a gate. And you can tell it has become one when you cannot get in without it.

There was a man five hundred years ago who took the prayers of the church out of a language ordinary people could not read, and put them into the language of the market and the milking shed, and he was accused of coarsening holy things. He said the point was not what the scholars would approve of, but what a mother would say to her child. A prayer that cannot be said in a chicken yard was, to him, a prayer half in exile.

Not too holy to be clear. That includes yours.