Praying At It or Through It

It is a small wooden one and it was a present, and it has been on that wall for six years.

The room is not a chapel and she would be uncomfortable if anybody called it one. It is the small bedroom at the front that nobody sleeps in, and there is a chair and a rug and a shelf with about nine books on it, and she is in there most mornings for twenty minutes before the house gets going.

She prays out loud, quietly. She always has. She is not a person who can do it in her head.

And on Tuesday, halfway through, in the middle of a completely ordinary sentence about her son's job, she noticed where her eyes were.

They were on the cross. They had been for a while, and they had been for years, presumably, and it had simply never once come up.

And something in her went slightly cold.

She did not stop praying. She finished the sentence and finished the twenty minutes. But she noticed herself noticing, and by Thursday she could not get through five minutes without the question arriving: what am I doing with my eyes, and does it matter, and has it always been like this.

She tried it once with her eyes shut and it was worse. She felt like she was performing something.

She has not asked anybody. There is nobody she could ask without it becoming a thing, and she has a horror of it becoming a thing.

What is lifted up was lifted in order to draw

Let me put down the plainest thing first, because it will steady the rest of this.

Nothing in this article is going to tell you what to do with an object in your house. Not to keep it, not to move it, not to look at it, not to avoid it. That is not what this is for and it never has been. It is not a small point: a stranger who tells you how to arrange the room you pray in is a stranger with no business in that room.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a way out: your attention has been traveling, not stopping, and a direction is not a destination. That is not my convenient framing of a hard week, it is what stands written in John's twelfth chapter, where the Lord says exactly what a thing lifted up is for, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that line was in the small room at the front on Tuesday.

Read what He says about being lifted up, and notice that He gives the purpose in the same breath.

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.John 12:32

Will draw all people to myself.

Lifting up, in that sentence, is not an end in itself. It is a mechanism, and the mechanism has a direction, and the direction terminates in a Person and not in a shape.

So this is yours right now rather than pending an answer to Thursday's question: what has been happening in that room for six years is drawing, because the written word gives the lifting up a purpose and the purpose is Him, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been carrying twenty minutes a morning along that line while you were talking about your son's job.

Now let me name what happened on Tuesday, because it is worth understanding and it will stop it recurring every time.

You did not discover a problem. You became conscious of a mechanism that works better unwatched.

The same thing happens to a person who suddenly notices their own breathing, or a musician who thinks about their hands mid-phrase. Nothing was wrong before the noticing and nothing is wrong after it, and the awkwardness is entirely a product of the attention having turned around to look at itself.

That is why shutting your eyes was worse. It was not more spiritual, it was more self-conscious, and you correctly identified it as performing.

Here is the guard, and it is the only rule this article will give you: through, not at. That is as far as anybody should go and it is as far as this goes. What is written puts God at the end of the line rather than in the object, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person's attention traveling rather than stopping, and He has been doing that for you every morning for six years without needing your supervision.