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# A rut worn deep enough
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/a-rut-worn-deep-enough/
- Published: 2026-09-26T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-26T09:59:59.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes

*"Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart." — Luke 18:1*

Luke says he told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart, and I notice that Luke tells you what the parable is *for* before he tells you what it is.

That is unusual and I think it is kind. He is saying: this one is for the discouraged. If that is not you this morning, fine, hold onto it, you will want it.

The parable is the widow and the unjust judge, and she wears him down by coming back, and I have never much liked it, if I am honest. I do not care for a story where God is standing in for a man who only helps you to get you to stop knocking. I know that is not what it means. The meaning runs the other way — if even *that* one answers, then how much more. I know. I have known it for fifty years. It still catches on something when I read it.

But it is not the judge that keeps me. It is the widow, and it is the word *always*.

Because the honest question is not whether God is like the judge. The honest question is how a person keeps knocking on a door that has not opened, for years, and does not turn into somebody bitter standing on a step.

I do not have a clean answer. I have got a practice.

The practice is that I say the same names in the same order every single morning, and I have said them in that order so many thousand times that I could not put them in a different one if I tried.

It is not inspired and most mornings it is not even warm. It is a woman at a table saying a list.

But here is what the sameness does. On the mornings I have nothing — and there are plenty of those, more than a person like me is supposed to admit in writing — the order carries me. I do not have to generate anything. The list is already there. I get in behind it and go.

That is praying always, as far as I can tell. Not intensity. Not feeling it. A rut worn deep enough that on the bad day the wheel finds it by itself.

Not losing heart is not a thing you decide on the morning you are losing it. It is a thing you build a long time before, out of a great deal of very boring repetition, so that it is standing there waiting for you when you need it and you did not have to build it that day.

*I have not got much this morning, Lord. Here is the list anyway.*