Hands Out and No Words

He is sitting on the floor of the front room with his back against the sofa, and the window has gone the color of weak tea, and he has been down here eleven minutes with both hands out in front of him and has not said one word.

This is the third week. He gets up before anybody, on purpose, because there is a stretch between the boiler coming on and the first foot hitting the landing that belongs to nobody, and he comes down here and sits on the floor in that gap and holds his hands out.

He used to have words. That is the part that gets him. He was a man who prayed properly, out loud, with structure, working down through the people he loves and the things that need doing, and it was not a performance, he meant every line of it. And then somewhere in the last long year the words went. Not dramatically. They just thinned and thinned until one morning he opened his mouth and there was nothing in it, and he sat there with his hands out feeling like a fool.

He has a shelf of books about this. Somewhere on it is a chapter on dryness he has read four times and cannot remember. He has tried starting with thanks. He has tried reading a psalm out loud to prime the pump. And every morning it comes back to this: a man on the floor at first light with his palms up, saying nothing, and then the boiler clicks off and a door goes upstairs and he puts his hands down and folds it away and tells nobody.

Because here is what he has decided about it, and he decided it weeks ago without noticing that he was deciding anything at all. This does not count.

This is not prayer. Prayer has words in it. What he is doing is sitting on a carpet with his hands out like a man waiting for change, and he is fairly sure it is the outward form of something that has quietly died on the inside. He would not say that sentence out loud to anybody. He has, twice, come close to saying it to his wife, and both times said something about the weather instead.

And underneath all of it, in a place he does not go before seven in the morning, the thing he is genuinely afraid of: I think I have gone cold, and I think it happened without me noticing, and I do not know how a person comes back from that.

The window keeps getting lighter. His hands are still out.

Perhaps that is your front room. Perhaps yours is the ten minutes in a parked vehicle before you go in, or the last of the night when everybody has gone up. You reach. You have nothing to say. And you have privately filed the whole business under failure, and you keep turning up anyway, which is the part you have not given yourself one ounce of credit for.

The reaching is not the preamble

Let me say the true thing first, because you have been grading yourself for weeks with a rubric nobody gave you.

The reaching is the prayer. Not the warm up to the prayer, not the posture you adopt while you wait for the real thing to arrive. The reaching. I want to put that in your hands before I show you the verse, and then I want the verse to do the rest, because David got there three thousand years before either of us and he wrote it down with no apology in it at all.

You are praying when your hands are out and your mouth is shut, and that has been true every one of these eleven minute mornings. Psalm 143:6 is written down for exactly this and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an old wordless line and lays it on the carpet beside a man who thinks he has gone cold.

I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land. Selah.Psalm 143:6

Look at what is actually in that verse. Two things and a rest.

Hands out. That is the first thing, and it is a body doing something, not a mouth. A thirst. That is the second, and notice he does not describe it, argue for it or dress it up. My soul thirsts after You, like ground that has had no rain. And then Selah, which is a musical rest, a pause, a lift of the hand off the strings.

He put a rest where you keep expecting a sentence.

That is what is on the page in the middle of a psalm by a man who could write like nobody else. He had all the words in the world and at the deepest point of the psalm he gave a posture, a thirst, and a silence. Nobody in the whole of Scripture comes along afterward and says, and then David really prayed. That was the praying.

You have been doing on a carpet at first light exactly what is written in the middle of Psalm 143, and it was never a lesser version of anything. The written word puts the hands and the thirst and the rest in that order, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an old rest mark into permission for somebody who has run out of things to say.

The thirst is aimed, not cured

Now the harder thing, and I am not going to soften it, because softening it is how this subject gets ruined.

That thirst does not go away at the end of the psalm. Read the rest of it if you like. He asks, he remembers, he stretches out his hands, and the psalm ends with him still asking. The thirst is not resolved. It is aimed.

And I know what has been done to you with this. Somebody has implied, at some point, that a mature believer arrives somewhere and stops being hungry. That the thirst is a beginner's condition and the goal is a settled person who does not need much. That is not in the text and it is not in the life of a single person in Scripture who ever knew God well. The people who knew Him best were the thirstiest people in the book. Moses, who had spoken with Him face to face, asked to see His glory. Paul, decades in, wanted to know Him. Nobody grows out of this.

You are not meant to be cured of wanting Him, and the hunger you have been apologizing for is the healthiest thing about your mornings. It is written in Psalm 143:6 that the soul thirsts after Him like a dry land, with no correction attached anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that and hands it to a man who thought his thirst was evidence of a fault.

Jesus said blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Read what He blesses. Not the ones who have arrived. The hungry and the thirsty, in the present tense, and the filling He promises does not abolish the hunger, it answers it, the way a meal answers an appetite that will be back tomorrow and is supposed to be.

So let me say it plainly, because this is the one thing I most want you to carry out of this page. You are fed this morning and you are still hungry, and both of those are true at once and neither one cancels the other. The written word calls the thirsty blessed and says they are filled, in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an ordinary silence on a carpet into being met.