Eyes and Ears Open

What did you expect prayer to feel like by now?

I ask because you would not be the first person to find that prayer has gone flat. You still say the words at night, but they land the way talking lands in a room the other person left an hour ago. Nobody warns you about that, and most of what people say about it does not help, because it usually suggests the flatness means something is wrong with you.

So look closely at the verse, and at the lines around it, because David is more exact than the verse alone suggests: "The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry." The very next line is the hard half: "The face of the LORD is against them that do evil." So God's attention here is aimed: His eyes are turned toward some people, and His face is set against others. Then, three verses later, David tells you who the righteous turn out to be: "The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart." The heading over this psalm ties it to the day David pretended to be mad in front of a Philistine king to save his own life (1 Samuel 21). David had fallen low when he wrote it, so the righteous in this psalm are people who ran to God when they fell.

The word I want you to keep is "open." God's ears are open, which describes how things already are with Him, whether or not you have found the right words. There is no appointment to book, no doorkeeper to get past, and no special wording that makes a cry acceptable.

Lord, I have been composing my prayers. I edit them before I speak, and then I wonder why they sound like talking to an empty room. So here is one unedited sentence about the thing I have been circling for a month, in the words I really think it in. The grammar may be bad and it may have no neat ending, and I will add nothing to dress it up. Your ears are open, because You said so Yourself. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 110 is Made a Watchman (Ezekiel 3:17).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna