After the words run out

"And this is the boldness we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us." — 1 John 5:14

I have been praying the same prayer for a long time now and I am beginning to think the prayer is changing me more than it is changing anything else.

I pray for my children. I pray for the woman at church who lost her husband. I pray for Edna and her hip and Pastor Holloway and the boy whose father somebody has to pray for. I pray for the children who will be back in the Sunday school room in a few weeks. I say the names and I hold the names and I set the names down and I say amen and I close the journal and I drink my coffee and the morning begins.

But something has shifted. I cannot tell you when it started. Sometime this summer, maybe. Sometime between the first tomato and the goldenrod along the road. The prayer has not gotten bigger. The prayer has gotten quieter. The names are the same names. The asking is the same asking. But the asking has stopped being the point, and I do not know what has replaced it.

I think what has replaced it is the listening. Not listening for an answer. I gave up listening for answers a long time ago, not because God does not answer but because the answers do not come in the language I was listening for. What I am listening for now is something underneath the names and the asking. Something that is there when the prayer is over and the journal is closed and the kitchen is quiet and I am sitting at the table with nothing left to say.

There is a kind of knowing that comes after the words run out. I do not have a name for it. My mother would have called it peace, but peace is not quite right. Peace suggests the absence of something. This is the presence of something. It is there when I stop talking and it is patient and it does not leave when I get up to do the dishes.

I do not know if this is what prayer is supposed to become after fifty years. I do not know if this is what all the old hymns meant when they talked about the still small voice. I know that the prayer has changed and I have changed and the changing has happened so slowly that I did not notice it until this morning, sitting at the table, listening to nothing, and hearing something.

Lord, I have run out of words. I think that is where you have been waiting.