Four Books About Prayer

Four this year, and he finished all of them, which is more than most people manage.

One of them was excellent. One was about a monastic tradition he had never encountered and he underlined a great deal of it. One he found thin and said so to a friend, at some length, with examples. The fourth is on the arm of the chair with a receipt in it at page ninety one.

He can tell you what four different traditions say about listening. He can tell you which of them he thinks is closest and why, and he would give you a good answer, because he has thought about it.

Here is the sentence, and it took him until about March to be able to form it.

He cannot remember the last time he heard anything.

Not a voice in the room. He is not expecting that and would be suspicious of it. He means the ordinary thing the books describe: a sense, a sentence, a settled knowing, something that arrived and was not his own thought. He knows what it is supposed to be like. He has read four accounts of what it is like.

And somewhere in the reading, without ever deciding it, he became a man who is extremely well informed about a conversation he is not having.

He would not put it that way to anybody. If you asked him at the study on a Thursday he would say his prayer life was in a dry patch, which is a phrase that does a great deal of work and costs nothing.

The claim is about sheep and not about scholars

There is a line Jesus makes about His own that is worth reading for what it does not require.

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.John 10:27

My sheep hear my voice. Present tense, plural, and stated as a plain fact about the animals rather than as an achievement by them.

Sheep are not clever. That is not an insult to anybody, it is the point of the image. Nothing in the ability to recognize a shepherd's voice depends on study, training, temperament or reading. A lamb three days old can do it. Recognition is not a skill in that verse, it is a relationship reporting itself.

Which means the four books were never the qualification, and their absence would not have been a disqualification either.

You are able to hear Him, and the ability was never earned by anything on that shelf. That is what the word plainly says, not encouragement I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a Shepherd's voice recognizable to somebody who has been reading about it.

What the reading was actually doing

Now the kind part, brother, because I have done exactly this and it is not what it looks like from outside.

Reading about prayer is not avoidance in the ordinary sense. Nobody picks up a fourth book about listening because they are indifferent to it. You read those four because you want the thing badly, and reading is what you know how to do, and it produces something immediately: a sense of progress, an underlined page, a paragraph you can quote to somebody on a Thursday.

Listening produces almost nothing immediately, which is unbearable to a man who is used to producing.

So the shelf grows and the chair stays empty, and neither of those is a moral failure. It is a competent man reaching for the tool he is good with.

And nothing about a full shelf has ever stood between you and His voice. Scripture puts hearing inside the relationship rather than inside the study, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to finish the fourth book.

Two minutes is not a technique

Here is the practical thing, and I want to be careful with it, because a message like this one can very easily hand you a fifth method.

Two minutes. Sitting still, with nothing playing and nothing to read.

That is not a technique and it is not a discipline you are being graded on. It is simply the removal of everything that has been filling the space, so that if anything is said you would be in a position to notice it. Very possibly nothing will come. That is not a failure and it does not mean anything about you.

You are not being tested in those two minutes, and silence in them is never evidence against you. He promised that His own hear His voice, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding anything from a man who has finally sat down.

And say something. Ask Him one actual question, out loud, in your own ordinary words, rather than reading somebody else's paragraph about how to ask.