Polite With God

Your prayers have become extremely well behaved.

You would not have noticed the change while it was happening, because it happened over years. But listen to yourself now. There is a carefulness in it. A certain formality. You thank Him for things and you ask for things for other people and you keep it tidy, and you do not bring up the thing.

That is the tell. There is one subject you do not raise with God, and you have not raised it for a long time, and the reason is not that you think He does not know.

It is that you have concluded He is disappointed, and there is a particular way people behave around somebody who is disappointed in them. They are polite. They are helpful. They do not get into it. They keep things pleasant and they leave slightly early.

You have been doing that with God for years.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have kept praying, which is more than most people do when they think somebody is let down in them, and you have gone at the thing itself for years and gotten up every time. Somebody who did not care would have stopped talking to Him entirely.

So this page is not going to tell you to pray more boldly. That is a technique and it does not touch the belief underneath.

I want to go after the belief. God is not disappointed in you, and I want to show you a verse that says what He is instead.

What politeness with God costs

Consider what has gone out of your prayer life since the carefulness set in.

Not the words. You still pray, faithfully, probably more than most people. What has gone is the roughness. The honest complaint. The unpolished sentence. And those were never the low quality part of prayer, they were the load bearing part, because those are the sentences in which a person actually arrives.

So you have been in the room with Him for years without arriving in it.

You have been present without arriving, and no polite prayer has ever once been the same thing as a prayer. Psalm 103:13 says like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a verse about fathers land on somebody who is being careful with God.

And notice how reasonable the politeness feels. It does not feel like distance. It feels like respect, and like maturity, and like not troubling somebody who has already been let down enough. That is why nobody, including you, has ever identified it as the problem.

You have been calling something respect that was never respect, and God has never once needed to be handled gently by a woman who loves Him. The written word says He pitieth them that fear him, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes pity in the strong old sense recognizable as tenderness rather than as condescension.

Like as a father pitieth

The psalm reaches for the plainest image it can find.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. (Psalm 103:13, King James Version)

Pitieth is not the modern word. It does not mean looking down on somebody. In that psalm it means the movement in a good father's chest when he sees his child struggling with something too heavy for them.

And that movement is not disappointment. Those are two completely different responses and no father in the world has ever confused them.

You are looked at with the movement in a father's chest, and it has never once been disappointment. Psalm 103 puts the pity and the fatherhood in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that recognizable to somebody who has been braced for a sigh.

And look at what triggers it in the verse. Them that fear him. Not them that manage it. Not them that have got on top of it. The trigger is reverence, which you have in abundance, and which is precisely why you have been so careful.

You have already met the only condition in that verse, and it has never once been performance that qualified anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a condition that is already met feel already met, and the written word says so the LORD pitieth them that fear him.

Say the ungraceful sentence

Now the part I came to say, and it is not going to sound spiritual.

Say the rough thing to Him. Out loud, badly, with no shape to it. The complaint, the anger, the tired sentence that has been sitting under the polite ones for years. That is not irreverence. That is arriving.

And if you want a model there are a hundred of them in the psalms, most of which are far less polite than anything you would consider saying.

You are allowed to bring the ungraceful sentence, and no rough prayer of yours has ever once offended the God who wrote the psalms. The written word is a book full of people saying unpolished things to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to say one out loud.

And here is what makes it safe. He is not disappointed. That is the whole thing this page came to say and it is worth repeating in the plainest words available. The premise your politeness has been built on for years is not true, so the carefulness is protecting you from something that is not there.

You have been protecting yourself from a disappointment that does not exist, and there has never once been a sigh in heaven concerning you. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a father's tenderness felt rather than merely believed, and Psalm 103:13 is the written word underneath it, where the pity is a father's and the only condition is reverence.