How to pray when you've prayed the same thing every day

You know the words by heart now. You don't have to think about how to start it any more, and that's not a good sign. Same request, same order, most of it in the same phrases you landed on somewhere around the second week.

And tonight you're aware of how it sounds. You're going to say it again. The same thing, to someone who has heard it every day this month and has not once said anything back. So you get about four words in and you hear yourself, and there's a flatness to it, and you finish quickly or you don't finish at all.

Then you say amen and the room is the same room. That's the part. Not that the situation hasn't moved — you were braced for that. It's that nothing comes back. Not a sense of being heard, not a verse landing, not a quiet in the chest. You speak into it and it stays exactly as it was before you spoke.

Nothing has gone wrong today. You keep bringing it, and the bringing has started to feel like something you do rather than something you say to anyone.

Here's what doesn't get said in that prayer.

Not the request. You say the request. You've said the request thirty times. What doesn't get said is the silence itself — that you've been speaking for a month into something that has never once spoken back, and that this is now the harder half of it. Harder than the thing you're asking about. You bring the need. You leave out what a month of no reply is doing.

And underneath that there's a worse one, and it's the reason the prayer has gone flat. Somewhere in the last week you stopped being sure anyone was there. Not a decision. You didn't stop believing — you'd still say the creed and mean every line of it. It's that nothing has come back for so long that it has started to feel like talking to the ceiling. You won't say that out loud, because saying it feels like the thing that would make it true. So you say the request again in the same words, and the actual thing you're carrying — that you can't tell whether you're being heard at all — never gets said to anyone.

There is a prayer for the thirtieth day, and it does not start with the request.

David wrote Psalm 13. Six verses. His enemy is on top of him and has been for a long time, and the psalm doesn't tell us the trouble ever lifted. Here it is, whole.

How long, Yahweh? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart every day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me? Behold, and answer me, Yahweh, my God. Give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death; lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed against him;" lest my adversaries rejoice when I fall. But I trust in your loving kindness. My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to Yahweh, because he has been good to me.

Count the how longs. There are four of them, and they are the first thing in the psalm. Not the request. Not a preface about God's goodness to get himself in the door. Four times, one after another, he says how long.

And look at what the first two are about. Not the enemy. God. Will you forget me forever. How long will you hide your face from me. Before David says one word about his trouble, he says that the person he is talking to has turned away and gone quiet on him.

A hidden face is not a hidden hand. He isn't saying God has failed to act. He's saying he can't find him — that he speaks and nothing comes back, and he has no way to tell whether he's being attended to at all. That's your month. That's the part you've been keeping out of your prayer, and it is the opening line of a song the people of God were given to sing.

So the first thing this psalm does is tell you what's allowed. The silence is not the reason you can't pray. The silence is the subject of the prayer. You don't have to establish that he's listening before you speak. You say that you can't tell whether he's listening, and you say it to him.

And notice the third one, because that one is about you rather than about God. How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart every day. Taking counsel in your soul is going over it on your own. Turning it, planning it, arguing it out with yourself at night with nobody there. David names that as part of the trouble. The lying awake constructing it is itself a thing he brings.

Then the request finally arrives, and it's small. Give light to my eyes. That's not deliverance. That's a man asking to be able to see, to not go under. He's been at this long enough that what he asks for has got smaller, and the psalm lets it be that small.

Now the turn, and be careful here, because this is where these psalms get misread.

But I trust in your loving kindness. My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to Yahweh, because he has been good to me.

Nothing has happened. Look at the text. No answer arrives between verse four and verse five. The enemy is not removed. Nobody tells David it's coming. The situation at the end of this psalm is precisely the situation at the start.

Now look at the tense of the last line. Because he has been good to me. Past. He is not saying God is being good to him now — nothing in this psalm says that. He's naming something God actually did, before this month, and putting his weight on it while the present stays exactly as it is. That's not optimism. Optimism is about what might happen next. This is a fact behind him that the silence cannot reach.

And it comes last. He does not start there. Thirty days in, if you begin with what God has done, it turns into an argument you're having with yourself. David says the how long first, four times, and only then reaches back.

So the turn is not cheering up. He didn't wait to feel better before he prayed, and he didn't feel better by the end. He said the accusation, he made the small request, and then he put his weight on something older than this month.

So here's the one thing tonight.

Before you say the request again, say the how long. Out loud, with you in it.

How long, God. It's been a month.

Say the number if you know it. Then say the part you've been keeping back. That you've been talking for a month and nothing has come back, and you can't tell any more whether he's there. Say it to him. If it's what you think, it's what you say. David said it first, and it was written down for you to use.

The request can come after. It's allowed to be smaller than it was.

You may get nothing back tonight. David wasn't answered inside this psalm either. What's different is that the whole of it got said, and got said to God rather than turned over one more time in your own head at midnight.

How long will you hide your face from me?

He said that to God, about God, while God said nothing. It's in the book, and nobody corrected him.

But I trust in your loving kindness.