Seven Words at the Back

He comes in the side door, always, and he stands at the back with his hat in his hands.

He does not sit. Sitting would commit him to something. He stands about two meters inside, near the pillar where the plaster has come off in the shape of a country nobody can agree on, and he stays for maybe twenty minutes and then he goes.

His mother would find this unbearable if she knew, and she does know, because mothers do.

What he does in those twenty minutes is try to pray, and what happens every time is the same. He starts. God. And that is fine, that comes out easily enough. And then there is a gap, and into the gap comes the thought that has been arriving for two years: that a prayer about this needs to be a proper one. That you cannot bring something of this weight in a handful of words like a man ordering coffee. That there ought to be an account, a context, an explanation of how it came about and what he thinks about it now, because otherwise it looks as though he is not taking it seriously.

So he begins constructing the account. And the account is long, because the truth is long, and somewhere in the second minute of construction he loses the thread, and then people are standing up, and he puts his hat back on and goes out the side door.

Two years of twenty minutes. Which is a great deal of standing.

And what he has never let himself do, because it feels like an insult, is the thing that would take four seconds.

That is you by the pillar.

You've decided this needs length. Not because anybody taught you that in a sentence, but because it is what seriousness looks like everywhere else in your life: you would not give a short account of anything else that mattered this much. So the prayer has to be built, and the building never finishes, and the four second version sits there looking like the one thing you are not allowed to do.

The shortest prayer in the Gospels, and the man went home justified

Jesus tells a story about two men praying, and one of them makes a long, accurate, well constructed speech. The other one is at the back, and this is the entirety of what he says.

And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.Luke 18:13

Count it. Seven words in English, and in the Greek it is six. No account. No context. No explanation of how it came about. Not one word about what he intends to do differently, which is the paragraph you have been trying to write for two years. The Holy Spirit is what makes six words carry, and never the six words.

And Jesus, who is telling the story and therefore gets to say how it went, says that man went down to his house justified rather than the other.

You are able to bring this in seven words, and seven words is a complete prayer, not a shortened one, and I am not making it easy on you: Luke 18:13 is the text, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my telling you so who can persuade a serious man that brevity is not disrespect.

Notice where he is standing. Afar off. At the back, by the pillar, exactly where you stand, and Jesus records the position without a word of criticism about it. The man does not come forward. He does not have to. The distance is in the story and it changes nothing about the outcome.

You have not been standing in the wrong place for two years, and the back of the room is where the man in the parable prayed the prayer that worked, which is written into Luke 18 rather than being my encouragement, with the Spirit of God able to make that land in a man with his hat in his hands.

Here is the part that took me years to understand. The long prayer in that story is not condemned for being long. It is condemned for being about the man saying it. And the short one is not commended for being short. It is commended because it is aimed entirely at God and asks for the one thing that is actually needed. Length was never the issue in either direction, which means the two years you have spent building an account were spent on a criterion Jesus does not use.

In my grandmother's house nobody ever explained themselves at the table. You came in, you sat down, a plate arrived. The explaining happened later or never, and the plate was not conditional on it. That is not carelessness about serious things. That is a household that has decided the door is not where the accounting happens.

This is yours right now, in six words or seven, with nothing explained and nothing promised, because Scripture puts that exact prayer in the mouth of a man who went home justified, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can actually say rather than a story you admire.