https://memlynhumphries.podbean.com/e/wednesday-in-silence

As I sit straight
And wait, bend
As the silence ends with
A communion of words
And a smile, I thank
You dear friends that
You choose to spend
This time together forming
Our world in ways
Too deep to fathom, too fragile
To comprehend, a presence
Loving, sheer,
Three in One.

Prayer for me is a participation in the divine, a quest on the journey into God, a reaching out into the unknowable. And the imminence of our desires and longings matter, forming the world we live in. The unseen and the unheard are powerful as our hearts melt and we reach out to God, untouched by reason, increasing our wells of goodness, knowledge, and love.

Do not give up, I tell myself. It’s difficult, and we place ourselves in a battle. Chance, time, and ever-present evil come against us. Often, we are victims of our genes and geography. But prayer levels us and takes us into hope.

Hopes not realized can destroy us. Hope borne of prayer held in loving presence, drunk from a fountain of blessing, endures because it’s a hope born of a relationship with the Holy. The Holy is at once present with us in the battle and separate from us drawing us into God’s self I believe. For me this is being in Christ.

Often, we have been fed false hope, a lie that being in a place, touched by a person or saying the right words will manifest our hope. This is hocus-pocus, born of a culture of success and performance. Those held in this illusion are so sure of themselves they dam the fountain of blessing and stand condemned themselves causing little ones to fall. Jesus tells us this is worse than drowning.

We can be so proud of our heritage and fear to tear down and rebuild. To pray is to be human, to engage with a reality that reifies spirituality into the world. People are released from suffering by the unseen hand of God working in, with, and through us. Every form is moulded by thoughts and prayers in my cosmology. But we turn our back on this sadly, because of what we have been fed.

Prayer feeds us with daily bread from heaven and slakes our thirst ever-flowingly. A contrite heart will release us, a return to who we really are – born, loved, and growing, enduring and persevering in hope even as we fail, as prayer fails.

No word spoken in secret or thought falls to the ground unheard but is fulfilled as it is taken up in the Divine I hope, and so, prayer never fails.

Picture Attribution

Jawlensky, Alexej von, 1864-1941. Meditation, The Prayer, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://act.library.vanderbilt.edu/artworks/56613 [retrieved November 14, 2026]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jawlensky_Meditation_Das_Gebet_1290067.jpg.