For most of my life I prayed like a person writing a letter to an office. I was careful. I made my case. I explained the situation to God as though He had come in late and needed catching up.
Then came a year where the thing I had asked for did not arrive, and the thing I had feared did. I will not pretend there was a lesson in every part of it. Some of it was simply loss.
What I remember is the morning my prayer collapsed into one word. I sat on the balcony before the city woke up and I said, morning. That was all. Just an acknowledgement that another one had come.
I said it again the next day, and the next. Somewhere in those weeks I stopped asking God to change my circumstances and started asking Him to stay. He had never left, of course. But I had never noticed how much of my praying had been about managing Him.
By the end of that year I had less certainty and more God. I would not choose the year again. I would not give back what it taught me either.
If you are in a season where your prayers have gone short, I want to tell you that short prayers are not weak prayers. Sometimes one honest word is the whole conversation, and He has been waiting for it.
