And Next Month, Lord

She noticed it properly on a hillside, which is where she notices most things.

She prays walking. It has been her way for years, since long before she had any language for why, and it goes on for about forty minutes and it is mostly ordinary. And somewhere in the middle of it she says the old prayer, the one everybody knows, because she likes the shape of it and because it puts her somewhere other than her own head.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And then, without any pause at all, because it is not a thought, she says: and next month.

She has said that for years. And next month too, Lord. And the winter. And the thing in March. It arrives instantly, in the same breath, in the same voice, and she has never once heard herself do it until that morning on the wall.

And what stopped her was not guilt. It was something odder. It was noticing that the added clause is the only part of the prayer she actually means.

She means the extension. The rest of it she says. She means the bit she added.

She sat on that wall for a while with the flask, not praying at all, and what came was this: she does not have a problem with tomorrow. She has a problem with the size of what she is willing to receive. Today feels too small to be an answer. Today feels like being fobbed off. If God gives her today, and only today, then she has not really been provided for, she has been kept going, and there is a difference and she has always felt it.

You know that clause. Yours might be a different one. And keep them safe. And let it last. And not just this week. You add it every time, quickly, so as not to seem greedy, and you have never once asked what the adding is for.

Come and sit on the wall. The light is good this early. There is a prayer in Proverbs that asks for a specific measure on purpose, and it is the strangest request in the book.

There is no code, and there is a measure

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I would rather you got up and walked on than sat here hoping for one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that produces a year in hand, and nothing here is a technique. And I want to say the second thing plainly: if you are genuinely short this month, nothing here tells you to stop asking for what you need. Asking is not the problem. This is for the person whose asking has a clause in it that has quietly become the whole prayer.

Here is the request. It is by a man called Agur, and it is one of only two things he asks for in his entire recorded life.

Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.Proverbs 30:8-9

Look at what he asks for. Not abundance. Not security. Food convenient for me, which in older English means the portion that is fitted to me, the right size, the amount that suits what I actually am.

And look at why. He gives two reasons and they are both about his relationship with God rather than about his comfort. Too much and he will forget Him. Too little and he will steal and drag His name into it. He is asking for the measure that keeps him close.

Now put your clause next to that. And next month. The clause is not wicked. But it is asking for a size, and Agur asked God to choose the size, and those are different prayers.

You are not asking for too much, and the measure was always God's to set rather than yours to specify. That is not a comfort I have arranged on a wall. It is written into Proverbs 30, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the strangest request in the book and lays it beside a woman with a flask at first light.

You have today, and today is met, and the size of it was chosen by somebody who knows you. Scripture says food convenient for me, which is a portion fitted to a person, and His Spirit is the one who makes a fitted measure feel like care rather than like restriction.

Now let me sit in the quiet part with you, because this is not really about arithmetic.

The clause is not fear of poverty. You have not been poor and I do not think that is what this is. The clause is about being taken seriously. Today feels like a small answer, and a small answer feels like not being fully attended to, and somewhere in you there is an old belief that being given a little at a time is what happens to people who are not quite important enough to be given the whole thing.

That is why the extension is the part you mean. You are not asking for more bread. You are asking to be considered properly.

You are considered properly, and a daily measure was never a sign of being taken lightly. Scripture says that the very hairs of your head are all numbered, which is God attending to a level of detail nobody asked Him for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lets it answer the thing under the clause rather than the clause itself.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because years of an automatic sentence do not stop because somebody sat with you on a wall. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what noticing never does on its own. So speak, out loud, up here where there is nobody. You have the standing to speak to a habit and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by prayerfulness, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a hillside.