Before You Learned Which Words

At four in the morning the extractor fan over the proving room made the whole back wall of the bakery hum, and the only cool place in the building was the fire escape.

Nadia was nineteen. She had flour dried in a pale line along both forearms and a milk crate she had dragged out there in her first week, and every night the ovens allowed it she went out and prayed out loud.

Out loud. Not under her breath. The yard below was empty except for the bins and a security light that came on for cats, and she talked to God the way you talk to somebody sitting on the step below you. Her hands moved. She repeated herself. She said things like, and the other thing, God, the other thing is, and then forgot what the other thing was. She thanked Him for the radio inside, which was playing badly. She thanked Him for her manager, who was not kind. She asked Him for a boy's whole family, name by name, including the dog.

Her grammar was terrible. Her theology was a bag of things she had picked up along the way: half a verse an aunt used to say, a chorus from a summer week away, something a stranger prayed over her at a coach station that she had never quite got out of her head. She would have failed any exam you set her.

And there was not one second of it that was performance, because there was nobody in the world listening to it except God.

Twenty-five years went by. They were good years and she is not sorry about a single one of them.

She learned. She sat under people who knew what they were talking about. She read the hard chapters. She found out that half a verse her aunt used to say was in fact half a verse, and what the other half did to the meaning of it. She learned to say things carefully, because she had watched careless things land on people who were already bleeding.

She also learned which words were unwelcome in which room.

That one she picked up by accident and she picked it up fast, the way you learn a hot handle. In one room a particular little word got a look. In another, a certain kind of confidence when she prayed produced a very slight stiffening around the table. In a third, the phrase she had used all her life about the way God speaks got corrected afterward, kindly, out in the corridor by the coats.

So she sanded. A word here. A phrase there. A whole manner of asking for things. Over twenty-five years she sanded her praying down to a surface that was safe in every room she was ever going to have to stand in.

And last Tuesday, at a table with four other people and a candle that would not stay lit, Nadia heard herself begin a sentence to God, edit it halfway through, and finish a different one.

It was a good prayer. Everybody said amen.

She sat in the car afterward with the keys in her hand and could not remember the last time she had said anything to God with her hands moving.

Underneath the arguments, on a milk crate

Nothing she learned was wasted. Take that first, because there is a cheap version of this message going around that says she should throw the twenty-five years in a skip and go back to being nineteen, and that is not what is on offer here. It would be a terrible trade and it is not what her heart is asking for anyway.

You are not being asked to un-know one single thing. Not a verse, not a correction, not a hard chapter that cost you a comfortable idea you were fond of. Jesus said in Mark 10:15 that a person receives the kingdom as a little child, and He did not say a person receives it by knowing less. The Holy Spirit is not asking for your ignorance back. He is asking for the posture back.

Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.Mark 10:15

Look hard at the verb. Receive. A child is not uninformed. A child is unguarded. A child asks for enormous things with a completely straight face and does not check the room first, because a child has not yet learned which of their words get looked at strangely, and so the words come out whole.

That is what you had out on that fire escape, and it is still what you have. You have not outgrown it and you have not disqualified yourself from it by getting educated. His word sets the child and the kingdom in one sentence deliberately, and the same Spirit who moved a nineteen year old to drag a milk crate out into the cold at four in the morning is in the room with you at this hour.

And the learning was gain. Real gain, bought at somebody else's cost and handed to you. The careful people who corrected you in corridors mostly loved you, and precision in the things of God is not a disease. Anybody who tells you the years of study were the problem is selling you something, and it is not this.

So we are not going backward. We are going underneath. You were not naive out there in the cold, you were unguarded, and those are two different words that get treated as one. Scripture says God has chosen the foolish things and the weak things and the things which are despised, and there is no evidence anywhere in it that He is embarrassed by a prayer with bad grammar in it. The Holy Spirit has never once flinched at one.

Look at what actually happened across those twenty-five years, because it was not that you got smarter. It was that you began praying with an audience in your head. Every room you learned to love added one more person to that audience, and every one of them was real, and every correction was probably right. But the audience followed you home. It came in through the door of the one room that was always supposed to have nobody in it.

You have a room with nobody in it. It is still there and it has not been repossessed. Not one person in any of those rooms holds jurisdiction over what you say to God behind a shut door, and Romans 8:26 says the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered.

Sit with that verse a moment, because it is not decoration. It says the Holy Spirit takes what comes out of you and carries it up Himself. It says the worst sentence you ever said to God arrived translated.

Which means you have never once been graded on your wording. Not on the fire escape, not at the table with the candle, not tonight. His word makes the Spirit the one who carries the prayer, and the whole apparatus you built to keep your praying acceptable was built to solve a problem that God does not have.