The Prayer We Stopped Saying Out Loud

There was a night when one of you did not say it, and the other one noticed and did not say anything about that either, and that was about fourteen months ago.

It had been the last thing. Lights off, and then the short one, the same words most nights, and then goodnight. It was not solemn. It had a domestic shape by the end, the way anything does when you say it four hundred times.

And then one night it was not said, and the next night it was not said, and by the third night the not-saying had a shape of its own that neither of you was willing to be the one to break.

Fourteen months.

You still both want it. That has not moved a millimetre. You know she still wants it because of what she does with her face when somebody mentions a due date. She knows you still want it because you go outside when the phone rings on a Sunday afternoon.

What neither of you knows is what the other thinks the silence means.

You think she stopped because it was hurting her. She thinks you stopped because you had given up. Both of those are guesses, and both of you have been quietly living with your guess for over a year, and neither of you has asked.

The verse has God singing in it

There is a line in Zephaniah that people misread because they read it as being about their own effort.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Every verb belongs to God. He is mighty. He saves. He rejoices. He rests. He sings.

There is nothing in that sentence for a couple to perform. The activity is entirely on His side, and the person in the verse is being sung over rather than being asked to sing.

That matters in a bedroom where the prayer stopped, because the fear underneath the silence has been that the asking was holding something open and that letting it stop has closed it.

It has not. You are being sung over in the fourteen months of silence exactly as you were in the four hundred nights before it. I am not putting my own opinion over you. Scripture says He will joy over thee with singing, Zephaniah 3:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been carrying that into a dark bedroom where nobody has said anything for over a year.

The silence is not unbelief

Let me take the weight of this off both of you, because it has been sitting on you separately.

Stopping was not a failure of faith. There is no verse anywhere in which God requires a nightly repetition in order to keep an ask open, and there is nothing in Scripture where a prayer expires because it was not renewed at bedtime.

The prayer you prayed four hundred times is not gone. God has it. Praying is not a thing that expires when it is not renewed.

And the reason you both stopped is almost certainly the same reason, which is that saying it out loud had begun to cost more than it gave, and two tired people stopped at roughly the same time without a conversation about it.

You have not lost ground with God in these fourteen months. Scripture says the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, Romans 8:26, and the Holy Spirit has been doing the asking in a room where neither of you could get the words out.

What is actually costing you

The silence about the thing is survivable. It is the silence about the silence that is doing the damage.

You have a guess about why she stopped. She has a guess about why you stopped. Both guesses are unkind to the other person in a small way that has been compounding for over a year, and neither of you has checked.

That is not a marriage in trouble. It is two people being careful, and being careful for a long time in the same room looks eventually like distance from the inside even when it is not. Scripture never called that unbelief, Ecclesiastes 4:12, and the Holy Spirit has not been counting it against either of you.

You have not drifted apart, you have gone quiet in parallel. Scripture says two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor, Ecclesiastes 4:9, and the Holy Spirit has been the third strand in that house since long before the prayer stopped.

And nobody is diagnosing anything here

I want to be plain, because you may have been handed things elsewhere.

There is no cause here to find. Nothing either of you did. No faith that was weighed and found short, no prayer said wrongly, no reason anybody is entitled to speculate about. Anyone who has implied otherwise was speaking outside Scripture and outside their authority.

And I am not going to promise you a child. That promise is not mine to make and making it would be a cruelty in a warm voice. Scripture is willing to sit with a longing and not resolve it, Psalm 13:1-2, and the Holy Spirit does not require a couple to be given an answer before He will be near them.