The Sentence I Was Going to Open With

There is a man I know who has been working on one sentence for three years.

He is a careful man. He measures things. In his trade a millimetre matters, and he has carried that habit into everything, including this, which is where it has done him a great deal of harm.

The sentence is the one he intends to open with. Not to a person. To God. He has decided, without ever putting it to himself this baldly, that a conversation of this weight requires a correct beginning, and he has been drafting that beginning for three years.

I have seen him do it. He goes up to the roof in the evening, which is where everyone goes when the heat comes off the stone, and he sits with a glass of tea and looks out at the roofs going gold, and he starts.

Lord, I want to bring You something. Too vague. Lord, You know what this is about. Presumptuous, he thinks, though he cannot say why. Lord, I have been carrying. Too much like a complaint. Lord, forgive me for. And here he stops every time, because the next word is the thing itself, and he has never once got the sentence past that word.

So he drinks the tea. And the light goes off the roofs. And he comes down.

Three years of evenings. A man with a millimetre in his hands, trying to find the tolerance on a sentence.

And here is what I want you to see about that roof, because I have sat on it with him and it is the saddest and most ordinary thing in the world. God is up there. He is there for all of it, for every abandoned draft, for the tea going cold, for the moment the man says the word out loud in his head and flinches from it. Three years of evenings in the company of Somebody who has been waiting, not for a better opening, but for the man to notice that the conversation started a long time ago and he has been in it the whole while.

That is you with the tea going cold.

You've turned the beginning into a threshold. You believe, somewhere under the level where you argue with yourself, that a badly worded start would be worse than no start, and so you have spent years polishing a first line that was never the door. The door was open the entire time. You have been standing in it drafting.

He answers before the calling, which means the calling was never the trigger

Isaiah is describing what things are like where God is, and one line in it dismantles a whole way of praying.

And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.Isaiah 65:24

Before they call. Hold that. If the answering can precede the calling, then the calling is not what starts the machine. Nothing you say at the beginning of a prayer is the switch that turns God's attention on, because His attention was already turned on before you opened your mouth, and the verse says so in the plainest possible order of events.

You are heard already, three years back, from the first evening you sat on that roof with a tea and could not begin, and I am not being generous with something that is not mine: Isaiah 65:24 says before, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying it who can carry that to a man who measures things.

Now let me say something about the word for hearing here, because in Hebrew it does not mean sound arriving at an ear. Shama means to hear in the sense of to attend to, to give yourself to, to take up a matter. It is the difference between somebody hearing you across a courtyard and somebody turning round and coming over.

You have not been waiting for God's attention. You have had it the entire time, and the wait has been entirely on the side of a sentence, which is written into the verse rather than being my consolation, with the Spirit of God able to make a careful man put down his rule.

Then there is the second clause, and it is even more generous. While they are yet speaking, I will hear. Not after. Mid sentence. Which means a prayer does not have to be finished to be received, let alone be well made, and a person who breaks off halfway through has not failed to complete a transaction. There is no transaction. There is a Father who came over before you called.

In my family, when somebody is going to say something difficult, the tea is poured first. Not after the difficult thing, as a comfort. Before it, from a height, so the pouring fills the silence and nobody has to begin well. That is a small kindness of hospitality, and it is a very old one, and the God of Isaiah has been doing something like it on your roof for three years.

This is yours right now, with no opening line at all, and the first word can be the word you have never got past, because Scripture puts the answering before the calling, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a place to stand rather than a lovely idea about God.