He Works the Wanting In You

She has never once decided to stop praying, and that is the thing she cannot get her head round.

There was no moment. She did not walk away and she did not get angry and nothing happened that she could point to.

What happened is that she has a rule, and the rule made perfect sense when she formed it, and it goes: do not do it if you do not mean it.

She saw people going through motions when she was young and it frightened her. She decided, at about twenty-two, that she was not going to be one of them, and so she would only pray when there was something real behind it. Never a performance. Never words for the sake of words.

For fifteen years that worked beautifully. There was nearly always something behind it.

She is forty-three, and about a year ago she noticed that she had not felt like praying in a long time, and that consequently, under her own rule, she had not prayed. Not properly. Grace at meals, which does not count in her own accounting, and the odd sentence in an emergency.

A year. And every day of it she has been waiting for the wanting to come back so that she can pray sincerely, and every day the wanting has not come, and the rule has held, and so has the silence.

Where Paul locates the wanting

Paul writes one sentence about who produces what in a believer, and it names the appetite specifically.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.Philippians 2:13

Both to will and to do.

The doing is the action. The willing is the wanting. And Paul puts both of them inside the same clause and attributes both to God working in a person.

Which means the thing you have been waiting for is on the list of things He supplies. The appetite is not the precondition you bring so that the praying can happen; it is one of the two things being produced in you.

So your rule has an arrangement inside it that Philippians denies. It says: I bring the wanting, and then God gets the praying. And the verse says both of those come from the same place and neither of them originates with you.

You have been waiting to produce something Scripture says God works in you. That is not me dismantling a rule you made for good reasons; Philippians 2:13 puts the willing and the doing together in God's hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lays it beside a year of waiting.

What the rule was right about

Now let me be fair to your twenty-two-year-old self, because she saw something true and I am not going to tell her she was wrong.

She saw people saying words with nothing behind them and something in her recoiled, and that instinct is good and it is why you are not a person who performs.

But the rule she made has a flaw that took twenty years to surface. It treats sincerity as a feeling. And sincerity is not a feeling; it is a correspondence between what you say and what is true. A woman who says I have nothing and I am here while feeling nothing is not going through motions. She is being exactly as sincere as it is possible to be.

The going-through-motions your younger self feared was people saying warm things they did not mean. It was never a description of somebody saying honest things without warmth.

You have been applying a rule about pretending to a situation with no pretending in it. The written word gives God the working of both the willing and the doing, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting outside a year of silence for a woman to generate an appetite first.

And the guardrail, because this is the landing category and there is no schedule coming. If the wanting does not return this month or this year, that will not be your failure. I am not handing you a practice to restart it, because a practice would just be a new precondition, and you have had one of those for twenty years.

You are not required to want it first, and the next flat stretch will not be a fault of yours either. Scripture puts the appetite on God's side of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit has been at work through a year in which a woman waited to feel something.