How to pray when no one asks how you are

There's a particular hour this is about. It's the one after you've got home and taken your coat off and there's nothing else that has to happen. The day is finished. Nobody is coming. The phone has nothing on it that needs answering, and if you turned it face down and left it there, it would stay quiet.

Most people have someone who asks how they are. Not a great conversation, not always a close one. Just someone who notices when you sound off, and says so. If you don't have that, the day ends without ever being said out loud to anyone. You had it. You were in it. And then it just stops, unspoken.

That's the hour. Not a crisis. Nothing has gone wrong today. It's the ordinary end of an ordinary day with no one in it.

Here's the strange part, if you already believe.

You know God is there. You'd say so if someone asked. You believe he hears prayer, and you'd defend that. But the day still goes unsaid. Because what you've got isn't a shortage of belief. It's that you've never actually talked to him about a Tuesday.

And when you try, something goes wrong with your mouth.

You start, and it comes out like a speech. Like something read at a service. You hear yourself doing it and it sounds fake, so you stop. Or you get as far as thinking there's nothing here worth saying — no emergency, no big need, just a flat day and nobody to tell — and that seems like a poor reason to bother him. So the day goes unsaid to God as well as to everyone else.

Two silences. Same evening.

There's a prayer written for this. I'm going to read it, and I want you to hear it before I say anything about it.

It's Psalm 142. It has a note at the top saying David wrote it in a cave, and that's all we get. He was being hunted at the time. He'd been a soldier and a favourite and then he was a man living in a hole in the ground.

I cry with my voice to Yahweh. With my voice, I ask Yahweh for mercy. I pour out my complaint before him. I tell him my troubles. When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, you knew my route. On the path in which I walk, they have hidden a snare for me. Look on my right, and see; for there is no one who is concerned for me. Refuge has fled from me. No one cares for my soul. I cried to you, Yahweh. I said, "You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living." Listen to my cry, for I am in desperate need. Deliver me from my persecutors, for they are too strong for me. Bring my soul out of prison, that I may give thanks to your name. The righteous will surround me, for you will be good to me.

Now look at how that's built, because it isn't built the way you'd expect a prayer to be built.

It starts with noise. He says he cries out with his voice, and then says it again — with my voice. Twice in one line. Whatever else this is, it's out loud. It's not a thought he had. It's a man in a cave making a sound.

Then he says what he's doing before he does it. I pour out my complaint. I tell him my troubles. He announces it. He doesn't apologise for it and he doesn't ask whether complaint is an appropriate thing to bring. He just says, this is what I'm about to do, and then he does it.

And here's the line the whole psalm turns on. Look on my right, and see; for there is no one who is concerned for me. No one cares for my soul.

He says that to God. That's the thing. He doesn't think it in the cave and then compose something more suitable. The complaint is that nobody cares about him, and the person he tells is God — who is right there, listening, while David says nobody's there.

He doesn't clear it up. He doesn't add, well, except you. He just says it, and it stands.

That's the shape, and it's worth having, because it's the opposite of what most people do.

Most people wait until the feeling has passed to pray about it. You wait until you can say it fairly. Until you can say it without sounding like you're accusing him. So you sit with a flat, unspoken evening, and you'll maybe mention it to God in a week, once it's tidy.

David prays it while it's still true. In the cave. While no one is coming for him.

And notice what he doesn't do. He doesn't tell himself he isn't really alone. He doesn't remind himself that God is enough and he shouldn't need people. He says the lack out loud as a lack — nobody cares — and one line later he says, you are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living. Both. In the same prayer. He doesn't use the second one to cancel the first.

He also doesn't get what he asked for by the end of it. Read the last line again. Bring my soul out of prison. He's still in the cave when the psalm finishes. The prayer doesn't end with the situation fixed. It ends with it said.

So here's the thing to do, and it's one thing.

Tonight, at that hour, say the day to him out loud. Not a summary and not a prayer voice. The actual day. What happened, what didn't, who you didn't speak to. Say it the way you'd say it to someone who came in and sat down and asked.

If your own words won't come — and for a lot of people they don't, the first few times — then use David's. Read the psalm out loud as your own. It's not borrowed. It was written down so it could be used by whoever needed it, and that's you.

Nothing might happen. He may not feel any nearer afterwards than he did before. David's prayer didn't get him out of the cave that night either. But it got said, and it got said to someone.

Look on my right, and see; for there is no one who is concerned for me. No one cares for my soul.

That's in the Bible. Said to God, by a man he loved, and left standing in the book without correction.

You can say it too.