The Prayer I Kept Putting First Was the One Keeping Me Out

The kitchen light is the only one on. It is 6:12 and the coffee has already gone cold because I poured it before I sat down, which is a mistake I make most mornings and have never once corrected. I had a list. Not a written list, but a list in the way that counts: the people I was going to pray for, the thing with work, the thing with my daughter's school, the thing I have been circling for months and calling prayer when it is actually worry with the lights off.

I got through maybe two minutes of it before I thought, I should probably read something first. And then I thought, no, that's cheating. You pray first. That's the order.

Where the order came from

I don't know who told me that. I grew up in church and could recite the right answers long before I understood them, so it is possible I invented the rule myself and then spent twenty years obeying it. Prayer first. Then the Bible. Otherwise you're just reading, and reading isn't praying, and if you read first you might run out of time and not pray at all.

Which is a reasonable thing to worry about, and also, I think, a way of making sure I do neither.

Because here is what the order actually did. It put the harder, vaguer, more disappointing thing first. Prayer is the part where I most often feel nothing. It is the part where I say the same eight sentences and wonder if I am talking to a wall or to God, and the wall answer is sometimes more convincing. So I would start there, run out of steam, close the Bible unopened, and count the morning as a loss. A loss I had engineered, carefully, by doing the spiritual thing first.

Somewhere in the last year — I could not tell you the week — I flipped it. Not as a decision. More the way you stop taking a road because of construction and then never go back to the old route. I opened the app on my phone, read a paragraph, sat with it, and prayed after. Or didn't. Some mornings I didn't pray at all. I just read.

What changed, and what didn't

The reading was not better than the praying. I want to be clear about that, because I have read enough of this kind of piece to know how it ends: the writer discovers the secret order and everything glows. That is not what happened. The reading was the same reading. Some mornings it landed and some mornings I looked at the clock.

But it gave my prayer something to stand on. I would read a line I had read twenty times and still do not fully understand — there are several of those, and I have stopped pretending they are not there — and then I would pray out of the small discomfort it left. Not a list. Just the discomfort. The psalmist does this constantly and I had never noticed, because I was always praying first, into the blank, with my own agenda.

Ruth told me once, years ago, that she reads the King James because it slows her down, and she does not apologise for it. I think now she was saying something about order without knowing she was saying it. Slow down first. Let something be said to you before you say your piece. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105, KJV) — a lamp for the walking, not for the standing still and reporting.

Pastor Ellis said from the pulpit two years ago that prayer is the greater discipline, and I still disagree, and I have never brought it up with him. I am not sure I am right. I am sure that for me, for this season, the order was the problem. Not the quantity. Not the sincerity. The order.

Dana would ask me the question I am avoiding, so let me ask it myself: is this just me rearranging furniture so I feel less guilty? Maybe. Some mornings it is. I read a paragraph and call it devotion and go make lunches. I do not have a clean answer for that, and I am tired enough tonight not to manufacture one.

What I can tell you is that the mornings where I read first, I pray more honestly. Shorter. Less like a list. And the mornings I pray first are fewer than they used to be, which is not a victory — it is just true.

So: when you sit down tomorrow, before the house is up, what are you actually protecting by doing it in the order you do it?

— Andy Stanly