Waiting at the Gate of the Shop

He prays between the van and the door, and between the door and the counter, and on the stairs.

He is not casual about it. He is one of the most consistently praying men anybody in that family knows. He prays while he drives, out loud, in two languages depending on what he is saying. He prays over his tools. He prays for his mother every time he passes the turning that goes to her street, which is eleven times a week.

Ask him about his prayer life and he would tell you it is good, and he would be telling the truth.

Here is the question his own son asked him in June, entirely without meaning anything by it.

Papá, when do you sit down with God?

He gave an answer about praying all day, which is true, and the boy accepted it and went off, and he stood in the yard with a socket set in his hand for about four minutes afterwards.

Because the honest answer, once he had actually looked, is that he has not sat still in front of God for longer than about forty seconds since he was a young man. Not once. He talks to Him constantly, on the move, at speed, in the gaps, and every single one of those prayers is real, and not one of them has ever involved staying anywhere.

He is fifty one. He does not know how to wait and has never tried, and he has started to suspect there is something on the other side of it that a moving man never gets to.

Wisdom describes somebody who does not pass by

There is a line in Proverbs where wisdom describes the person who actually gets her, and the picture is entirely about location.

Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors.Proverbs 8:34

Every word in the second half is about staying.

Watching daily at my gates. Not passing the gate. At it. Waiting at the posts of my doors. A man leaning on the frame of a door, in no hurry, prepared to be there a while.

That is not a description of somebody praying on the way past. It is a description of somebody who has arrived somewhere and stopped.

And notice what the blessing is attached to. Not to the man who speaks daily, though speaking is good and you do a great deal of it. To the man who heareth, and the hearing is joined in the same sentence to the waiting.

You are blessed in the waiting and not only in the going, and the door is open to a man who stops at it. That is what the word actually pictures, not a rule I am imposing on you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that real to a man with a socket set in his hand.

The praying on the move is not the problem

Now let me be clear, hermano, because there is a version of this that would insult a genuinely good life and it is not the one I am writing.

Those prayers count. All of them. The van, the stairs, the turning to your mother's street eleven times a week. God has heard every one and none of them was a lesser kind.

Nobody is asking you to pray less on the move.

What you have never done is stay, and staying is a different act with a different fruit. Praying on the move keeps a relationship warm. Waiting is where a person receives something they did not bring with them. Both are real. You have one of them, richly, and you have never had the other, and forty seconds is about how long a moving man can bear the first time he tries.

And nothing about a life in motion has kept you from His voice. Scripture blesses the one who waits at the door and never once condemned the one who prays on the road, and the Holy Spirit is not choosing between the two in a man who has done one of them faithfully for thirty years.

Forty seconds is where it starts

Here is the practical thing, and it is designed for a man like you rather than for a monk.

Two minutes, sitting, nothing playing.

At about forty seconds something in you will stand up. Not a thought, a physical urge, and it will present itself as a job that needs doing right now which has waited three days and could wait another ten minutes.

Notice it. Stay down.

That forty second mark is not a spiritual obstacle. It is the exact edge of everything you have ever practiced, and going past it is the whole exercise.

You are able to stay, and the staying is not a talent some men are born with. He promised blessing to the one who waits at the posts of His doors, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps a moving man in a chair for the second minute.