The One In The Room And The One In The Car

There is the one you say in the room and there is the one you say in the car, and the drive between them is eleven minutes.

The room one has a shape. You have been saying versions of it since you were a boy and the words come without being sent for, and when it is your turn to pray at your mother's on a Sunday, everybody in that house closes their eyes and means it.

The car one starts somewhere around the second set of lights.

It has no shape at all. It is mostly the same four things over and over. Some of it is not respectful, in the sense that you would not say it in front of your mother, and at least twice it has been a single word said several times with your hands on the wheel at ten and two.

And you have a settled opinion about the two of them, which you have never stated out loud.

You think the room one is the prayer and the car one is what happens to you on the way home.

Let me say something before we go further.

I am not correcting you.

Neither of them is false. The room one is real and your family is not being deceived, and the car one is not a breakdown. I am not going to tell you to combine them or to bring the car one into the house.

I am saying I know about the second set of lights. That is all.

Increase our faith

Here is a request that the apostles made out loud, in a group, to His face.

And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith.Luke 17:5

Look at what that sentence admits.

They are not asking for more of something they have plenty of. Nobody asks for an increase in a thing they have enough of. The request contains the confession, and they made it corporately, out loud, in front of each other, which means none of them was pretending to be the one who had it sorted.

And notice what Jesus does not do. He does not rebuke them for the state of it. He answers with the mustard seed, which is a strange answer if the problem were quantity, and it is exactly the right answer if the point is that the quantity was never what they thought it was.

So let me turn and say it straight to you, on the pavement outside with the families going past.

You are asking the same thing the apostles asked. Not one day, not once your prayers agree with each other, not when the car one gets respectable. Right now, standing there with a child pulling at your sleeve, you are in the position of the twelve in Luke 17, and they said it in a group without shame and He answered without correcting them. 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 man on a real Sunday morning.

Now, about the grading.

Here is what I think has happened. Somewhere, probably young, a lesson landed that a prayer is a thing with a shape, and everything shaped got sorted into the real pile.

But look at what is actually in the car. Four things, over and over, and one word said several times with your hands on the wheel.

That is not the absence of prayer. That is what prayer looks like when a man has run out of furniture. The psalms are full of it. Half of the ones your mother would recognize have exactly that structure, which is to say almost none.

And take this in, because it is already decided rather than pending. You have not been running one real prayer and one leak. The word says increase our faith, which is a four word request with nothing decorative on it, and the Lord took it seriously, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real car on a real road at a real hour of the afternoon.

There is no sorting at the door. That picture is not in the Bible anywhere. Both of them arrive and both of them are heard.