Fifteen Minutes You Keep Promising

Every night for about two years he has promised God fifteen minutes.

It happens in the same place. Upstairs, on the edge of the bed, after the house has gone quiet, phone in his hand because he brought it up to set the alarm.

He thinks: right. Fifteen minutes.

And then he checks one thing. That is always how it goes. One thing, and the one thing is never anything, and forty minutes later he is reading about a footballer's transfer or a stranger's opinion about a film, and he puts the phone on the side and lies down and says, into the dark, "Sorry. Tomorrow."

Two years of that. Somewhere in the region of six hundred apologies.

He is not a shallow man. He carries other people's troubles around all day. He notices things. He rang a man on his own street in February for no reason except that he had thought about him twice, and it turned out to matter enormously.

He simply cannot get fifteen minutes.

And the thing that has grown up around this, slowly, is not guilt exactly. It is more like a settled understanding, at the back of his own mind, that he is a man with a shallow prayer life who talks a good game. He has never said this to anybody. He would deny it if you asked him directly. It sits underneath, and it comes out most nights around eleven o'clock, in one word: sorry.

The instruction was a door, not a quantity

Jesus says a sentence about private prayer that everybody has heard and almost nobody has read for what is actually in it.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.Matthew 6:6

Take that on the edge of the bed. You are heard the moment the door shuts and not a minute later. The word says pray to thy Father which is in secret and puts no number in the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a sentence to Him.

Count the instructions. Go in. Shut the door. Pray.

There is no third element. No number. No duration. No minimum. The entire architecture of that verse is a door closing, and the point of it, in context, is not length at all: it is that nobody is watching, because the paragraph before it is about people praying for an audience.

Somebody put fifteen in your head. It was not this verse.

So take this on the edge of your bed, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written: you are heard the moment you speak, right now, at any length. His word says pray to thy Father which is in secret, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a sentence to Him, and the Spirit has never once been paid by the minute.

Two years of apologies have gone up to a Father who was not counting.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who prayed at four in the morning for fifty years and is quoted about it endlessly. What gets quoted less is the machine he built for everybody else.

He built practices for servant girls and coal miners.

People with fourteen hour days, no candles, no privacy, no room of their own and no clock they controlled. He gave them short readings. Six people in a room at whatever hour their work allowed. A handful of plain questions asked out loud. Nothing in it required an hour, because they did not have an hour, and he knew it.

The nickname came as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it fit.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the method lasted because it was cut to the size of a real life rather than an admired one.

Fifteen minutes is not a real number for you. It is an aspirational one, and you have been failing an aspirational number nightly for two years and calling the result a diagnosis.