The Conversation I Stopped Rehearsing

You had it perfect at one point.

Not a speech. You would have hated a speech. But you knew the opening line, and you knew what you would do with your hands, and you knew where you would leave the pause so that he had somewhere to come in if he wanted to.

You ran it walking. You ran it in the truck. You ran it lying flat on your back at two in the morning more times than you would want to count out loud.

And every version of it ended the same way, which is to say that every version ended with him saying something, and the something changed depending on what kind of night it was, and on the good nights it was worth the running.

Then somewhere in the fourth year, you stopped.

Not the wanting. The wanting is still there and it will be there when you are eighty. What stopped was the rehearsing, and about a month after the rehearsing stopped, the asking stopped too, because the two of them had been the same activity for so long that you did not notice one had been carrying the other.

You have not brought it to God in a long time. Not properly. Not out loud.

Let me name something before we take one more step, because you are the sort of person who will start carrying this as another failure and I am not going to let that happen quietly.

I am not correcting you.

There is no fault in stopping. A person who has run the same conversation four hundred times is not lazy and is not faithless. That is exhaustion, and exhaustion is a wound, and this is a wound before it is anything else.

I am saying I know roughly how many times you ran it. That is all.

Mercies do not run on your stamina

Here is a man writing in the middle of something that had not resolved and was not about to.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

Read what is around it, because the context matters more than usual here. This is Lamentations. Nothing in the surrounding chapters has been fixed. The man writing has not received his answer and he is not pretending he has.

And in the middle of that he says two things about the mercies. They fail not, and they are new every morning.

New every morning is not a decoration. It means the supply is not drawn from yesterday's reserve. It is not the case that a man who used a great deal of grace last year has less available to him this year. The morning is the unit, and every morning arrives full.

So let me turn and say it straight to you, with the water going somewhere behind you.

You are not running a deficit. Not one day, not when the tiredness lifts, not after you have made up the ground of the last year. Right now, standing exactly where you are, you are inside a mercy that reset while you slept, and it did not read your record before it arrived. That is not my sentiment. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written line down onto a real person on a real morning.

Now, why did the asking stop when the rehearsing did?

Because you had welded them together, and you did that without noticing. Every time the conversation ran in your head, it ended with you asking God for the version where it goes well. The two things happened in the same fifteen minutes, four hundred times.

So when the rehearsing became more than you could carry, and you set it down, the asking went into the same box, and the box went on a shelf, and nobody told you that the two had ever been separate things in the first place.

That is not sin. That is what happens when a request lives inside a habit and the habit gives out.

But look at the shape of this. The rehearsing was the part that cost you. The asking is the part that costs nothing at all, and it never did, and you can have it back without picking the other one up again.

And take this in, because it is already decided rather than pending. You have a fresh morning's worth of mercy for this, and it was not reduced by the four hundred rehearsals. The word says his compassions fail not, and fail not is a phrase about a supply that does not run down, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise into a real life on a real Tuesday.

You are allowed to ask without staging it. That has always been allowed. Nobody told you.