Before the Please

The list is on a clipboard, written in his own capitals, and every line on it is a thing he has not got. Four sheets of eighteen mil ply. Two boxes of the long screws. Hinges, the brass ones, because the customer changed her mind. Glue. He is third in the queue at the timber merchant with the roller door only half up and the cold coming under it, and he reads the list the way he has read every list for thirty years, top to bottom, checking it is complete, which means checking that nothing is missing from the record of what is missing.

Behind him a plasterer is talking about a job that has gone over. In front of him a lad in a hoodie is paying for a single bag of sand and counting coins to do it. The man at the counter knows him by his surname and by his van. He likes this place. He has liked it for thirty years.

And standing there, with the clipboard against his chest, he catches himself doing the thing he does. He is praying. Not on purpose. It has become the way his mind idles: a low sentence to God running under the noise of the yard, and this morning, because he is holding a list, he can hear the shape of it. Please let the ply be in. Please let the customer settle up this month. Please let the knee hold till the job is done. Please. Please. Please.

He has been a believer since he was nineteen. He has prayed every day of the eleven years since his wife's diagnosis and every day of the twenty before it. And here, third in a queue with a lad counting coins in front of him, it lands on him like a dropped board: he cannot remember the last time he opened his mouth to God and it was not the start of a list. Every prayer is a clipboard. Every line is a thing he has not got.

You know that clipboard. It is the one you carry into every quiet moment. Everything on it is true and everything on it is missing, and you have talked to God about the missing things for so long that you have forgotten there is another way to open your mouth. There is. It is older than the please, and it comes first.

The oldest prayer opens the other way

Here is what a Hebrew blessing actually does, and it is not what most of us were taught a prayer does. It does not open with what is missing. It opens with what is true.

Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.Psalm 103:2

Read that slowly. The psalm does not begin, "Lord, bless me." It begins, "Bless the Lord." The direction of the sentence is upward before it is ever inward. The one Hebrew word underneath it is barukh, blessed, and it is the first word of the oldest prayers Israel prayed: blessed are You, Lord our God, who brings bread from the earth; blessed are You, who has kept us alive to this day. Nobody was asking for bread in that sentence. They were naming, out loud, that bread had come.

That is the shape. Before the please, a blessing. Before the list of what is missing, a sentence about what has already been done. And notice what the psalm says happens if you skip it: you forget. Not that God forgets you. That you forget Him, forget the benefits, forget the whole record of what He has already carried, because a mind that only reads its own clipboard has no page for it.

You have a record with God that is longer than your list. I am not making that up to comfort you; it is what the written word says, forget not all His benefits, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings those benefits back to mind when the clipboard has crowded them out. Every year you were kept. Every job that came in when the diary was empty. Every morning the knee did hold. It is all there. It has been there the whole time you were reading the other page.

Nobody is taking the list off you

Now hear this plainly, because the joiner in the queue is going to hear it wrong, and so might you. Nothing about this says that asking is small, or that the list is unspiritual, or that God is tired of your please. He is not. Jesus taught His friends to pray for bread, and He meant today's bread, and He meant ask. The list is welcome. Every line on it is welcome. The four sheets of ply are welcome and the knee is welcome and the customer who changed her mind is welcome.

The order changes. The need is not silenced; it waits its turn, and it turns out to be a short wait, and it turns out that a need spoken second, after a blessing, is spoken by a steadier man than a need spoken first, because the man speaking it has just reminded himself out loud who he is speaking to.

You are talking to the God who has already brought bread from the earth for you. That is not my line. It is what Scripture puts in the mouth of anyone who blesses Him first, and it is what His Spirit is teaching your mouth to say now, in a queue, with a clipboard against your chest. The please is not gone. It has simply stopped being the first word.

Watch what it does to the list. The clipboard does not get shorter, but it gets lighter, because you are no longer reading it to a stranger. You are reading it to the One who has a longer list on His side of the counter, and His is the record of what came in.

You have a welcome that was never conditional on the order you say things in. The written word says He hears the cry of the needy and does not despise their prayer, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a half-said sentence up whole when a tired man cannot finish it, so nothing here is a technique and nothing here is a hurdle.