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# The prayer got shorter
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/the-prayer-got-shorter/
- Published: 2026-09-08T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-08T09:59:59.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes

*"The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective." — James 5:16*

I have been praying a different way since the light changed and I did not decide to do it.

That is the part I keep turning over. I did not sit down one morning in August and resolve to pray differently in September. Nothing happened. Nobody said anything to me. But the mornings got shorter at one end and cooler at the other, and somewhere in there the prayer changed shape without asking my permission, and I only noticed it this week.

In July I prayed long. July prayers sprawl. There is so much light in a July morning that the praying spreads out into it and takes its time and wanders off and comes back. I would sit here with the coffee and the list and the window open and go on for a good while, and some of that was prayer and some of it was just me enjoying being awake.

September prayer is shorter and it is heavier. It has the weight in it that a cool morning has. I sit down and the names come up and there is less circling. Edna's hip. Hannah. The woman at church who has stopped saying how she is when you ask. Pastor Holloway. Dan and Beth and the children. The names arrive faster and stay less time and land harder, like the difference between rain in August and rain in October.

James says the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. I have never known quite what to do with that verse, because I do not think of myself as righteous and I have never once felt powerful, and I have prayed a great many prayers that were not effective in any way I could measure. Earl is still dead. Hannah is still finding her way. The woman at church still says fine.

But I have stopped reading it as a promise about outcomes. I think it is a sentence about seriousness. A prayer prayed by somebody who means it is doing something, whether or not I can see what. The seriousness is the power. The meaning-it is the effect.

And September is a serious month. That may be the whole answer. The light gets honest in September and the praying gets honest with it.

The coffee is down to the last inch and it has gone cool, which in September I do not mind.

*Lord, take the short prayers too. They are the ones I mean most.*