Ben Myers recently wrote in Faith and Theology...

Ben Myers recently wrote in Faith and Theology about his year without prayer:

And then there was the year without prayer. Or was it two years? Three? Or five? I guess I lost count. Anyway, all that time I could not pray.

Don’t ask me why, don’t ask me to explain it. It’s not that I stopped believing: not exactly. It’s just that everything around me was a terrible silence, and any word, a shout or just a whisper, would only make the silence echo louder. It’s not that I had stopped loving: not completely. It’s just that my heart was cracked inside me, and all the words seemed stillborn, choked by sadness before they ever could get out. It’s not that I stopped trying: not quite. It’s just that I tried to pray instead of praying. It is the difference between trying to swim and swimming, between trying to remember someone’s name and remembering. You might come close, but in the end it makes no difference. In the end it is not a matter of degrees.

This post reminded me of one of my favorite quotations about prayer. In Power and Passion, Sam Wells says,