The One Thing I Do Not Pray About

You pray about everything.

That is not an exaggeration and it is not a boast. You are a praying woman. You pray about your children and your husband's work and the woman at church who is having a hard year, and you do it faithfully and you do it in detail and you have done it for decades.

And there is one thing you have never once brought.

You have a reason, and the reason is respectable. It is that this one is yours. It is not a hardship that came at you. It is a subject where you believe there is work outstanding on your side, and you have decided, without ever saying it in words, that it is not appropriate to hand somebody a job you have not finished.

So you wait. And the waiting has lasted decades, and the thing has never been prayed about once.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with this. Not with the praying and not with the thing itself. You have gone at it repeatedly, over years, and gotten up every time, and the reason you have not brought it is not indifference, it is a kind of integrity that has gone slightly wrong.

So this page is not going to tell you to pray harder about it. That is more of the same.

I want to look at a verse where the instruction is not to finish the work first.

The rule you made without noticing

Consider the rule running underneath all this, because it is worth seeing written down.

It goes: things that happen to me may be brought to God, and things that are my responsibility must be dealt with before they can be brought. That distinction sounds so sensible that nobody would ever challenge it, including you.

But run it out. Under that rule, the subjects a person carries longest and most privately are precisely the ones that never get prayed about, because they are the ones with work attached. The rule quietly excludes the heaviest items from the only place they could be set down.

You have a rule that excludes the heaviest things, and no such rule has ever once been given to anybody. First Peter 5:7 says casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the word all in that verse do the work it was written to do.

And notice what the rule implies about God without ever saying it. It implies He is somebody who should be handed finished work. That He is an employer rather than a father, and that bringing Him an unresolved matter is a kind of imposition.

You have been treating God as somebody who receives finished work, and He has never once been that in the history of the world. The written word says he careth for you, given as the reason for the casting, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes care the operative reason rather than competence.

Casting all your care

Peter writes it in one short line with one enormous word in it.

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you. (1 Peter 5:7, King James Version)

All. Not all the ones that arrived from outside. Not all the ones where your part is done. All.

And the reason given is not that God is efficient or that He is owed your problems. The reason is that He cares about you, which makes the casting an act of relationship rather than of delegation.

You are casting rather than delegating, and no care of yours has ever once been excluded from that word all. First Peter 5 gives the reason as affection rather than as capability, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a one line instruction usable on a subject that has been held back for decades.

And read the verb. Casting is not placing carefully. It is throwing. There is nothing tidy in it. Peter does not say present your care in an appropriate form.

You have been given a verb with no tidiness in it, and no prayer has ever once had to be presentable to be received. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an untidy prayer land, and the written word says casting all your care upon him, using the word for throwing.

Say the plain sentence

Now the part I came to say, and it is almost too simple.

Pray one plain sentence about it. Not a request, not a plan, not a confession, not a whole treatment of the subject. One sentence, in ordinary words, out loud.

You know what it is. It has been sitting behind the polite prayers for years and it does not need composing.

You are able to say the plain sentence today, and no unfinished work of yours has ever once been a reason to wait. The written word says casting all your care upon him, which puts no condition of completion anywhere in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a first sentence possible after decades of silence.

And here is what makes it safe. Bringing it is not the same as announcing that you have failed at it. It is not a report. There is nothing being submitted. Peter's word is throw, and there is no evaluation on the other end of a throw.

You are throwing something rather than submitting something, and there has never once been an evaluation waiting on the other end. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that difference hold in the moment of praying, and 1 Peter 5:7 is the written word underneath it, where all the care goes over and the reason is that He cares for you.