She can pray. Everybody in that building would tell you so and they would not be exaggerating.
When there is a fight, she is the one you want. When somebody is in a hospital and it has gone bad and nobody knows what to say, she says something, and it is not noise, and people who were in the room will describe it years later.
She has a voice for it. It comes up out of somewhere and it fills a space and there is not an ounce of performance in it, and she has never once been able to explain where it comes from.
She is fifty two.
And in April she was on a beach with her sister, which is a thing they do once a year, and it was a good day and nothing whatever was wrong, and her sister said, in the way you do on a beach, "Pray for us."
Nothing to contend for. No sickness. No crisis. Two women, a flask, and a sky.
And she could not.
She got about six words out and heard herself, and what she heard was the fight voice, at half strength, aimed at nothing, and it was so obviously wrong for that beach that she stopped in the middle of a sentence and laughed and said something about the wind.
She has not stopped thinking about it since.
She has one volume with God. One. She has prayed for twenty years like a woman standing in front of something, and there is a great deal to stand in front of and it has been right and it has been needed.
But if there is nothing to stand in front of, she has nothing. There is no other setting. She would not know how to pray on a beach with a flask and a sister and nothing wrong.
You know that voice. Yours may be quieter than hers. But you know what it is to have one way of being with God, built for one kind of hour, and to be entirely at a loss on the day when that hour is not the one you are in.
Only one of the two needs a fight
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes a criticism of how you pray it will be nonsense, and half that congregation would line up to say so.
The pit is not the volume. The volume is a gift and it is real and it has held people up in the worst rooms of their lives. The pit is that you have one, and one is not a whole relationship, and a woman with one setting will meet a day with no enemy in it and find she has no idea how to be with God at all.
Here is the verse. It is in a song Moses sang at the end of his life.
Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee.Deuteronomy 32:18
Two halves in one line, and one God in both.
The Rock that begat thee. A father's word, and a strong one, and it sits perfectly comfortably beside the way you already pray. A Rock is a thing you stand on when something is coming.
And the second half, in the Hebrew, is the word for a woman bringing a child to birth, which is why a good many translations render it as the God who gave you birth. Moses put both in a single line, about a single God, and saw nothing to reconcile.
Now notice the thing that matters for a woman on a beach. Only one of those two requires an enemy.
Standing on a Rock implies weather. Being given birth does not imply anything at all except that you exist and that somebody brought you here. It is not a battle posture. It has no opponent in it. It is a relation that is entirely true on a day when nothing whatever is wrong.
Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground the two never travel apart. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Deuteronomy 32:18 does not make God half a father and half a mother, and it does not give Him a softer side to go with the strong one. It uses two pictures, both chosen by Him, for one God whom neither exhausts. He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the pictures stay in the form He gave them.
Take that on the beach, and know it is not my correction, it is what is written. You are dealing with a God who gave you birth, and that half of Him does not need a fight to be true. Deuteronomy 32:18 has both halves in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens a second setting in a woman who has had one for twenty years.
You do not know how to sing quietly, and it is not because your voice is wrong.
You are heard at the volume of a goodnight, and you were never only audible when there was something to fight. Deuteronomy 32:18 has both halves in one line about one God, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens a register a woman has never had, and He is not put off by how long it has been shut.
It is because a voice that has only ever been used to fill a room has never been asked to do the other thing, and the other thing is not a smaller version of the first. It is a different action.
So do it as a different action, and do it deliberately, and do it where nobody can hear.
Here is the specific instruction: pray one sentence out loud at the volume you would use to say goodnight to a child who is nearly asleep.
Not a whisper, which is a performance of quiet. The actual volume of an ordinary sentence said close to somebody, on a landing, at night, when there is nothing to be done and nothing to be fought.
And do not pray about anything. That is the second half of the instruction and it will be harder than the volume. A woman with your gift will find something to contend for inside four seconds, because contending is the shape her praying has, and there will always be something available.
You are held by a God who gave you birth, and on a beach with nothing wrong He is exactly as present as He is in a hospital corridor. That is Deuteronomy 32:18, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens the quiet setting, and He is not less at work in it, and He has been waiting on that beach since April.
And your sister asked a good question. She did not know she was asking it, but she did.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, quietly, which is the point. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over twenty years of one setting is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your being able to produce a new voice tonight. These stand on what is written in Deuteronomy and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your volume. When the quiet comes, and how, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- One volume I have prayed at for twenty years, you are a gift and you are not the whole of how He is with me, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Deuteronomy 32:18 says the Rock begat me and God gave me birth, and only one of those two needs an enemy.
- Idea that a day with nothing wrong in it is a day with nothing to say to God, you have no ground on that beach. It is written that both halves stand in one line about one God, and His Spirit is the one who opens the other setting, which I have never once used.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You both begat me and gave me birth. I say one small true sentence at goodnight volume with nobody to hear it, and I am not building it and I am not raising it.
Deuteronomy 32:18
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