A Prayer for the Ten Minutes Before That Conversation

The phone is face down on the table. You have rehearsed the first sentence four times and it still sounds wrong. In nine minutes you have to call, or knock, or walk into the kitchen where they are sitting, and say the thing you have been avoiding for weeks. Your stomach is doing something unpleasant. This is not a metaphor. This is where you are right now.

We are not going to tell you what to say to them. We do not know your situation well enough for that, and a script rarely survives contact with a real conversation anyway. What we want to give you is something to say to God in these last minutes, because most people arrive here with nothing but dread and do not know that dread is allowed to be a prayer too.

What you can honestly say first

Before anything gets straightened out with the other person, something needs saying to God, and it does not need to be dignified.

You can say you do not want to do this. You can say you are angry, or frightened, or that you have already decided how it is going to go badly, and you would like to be wrong. None of that disqualifies you from praying. It is closer to the point.

He who answers before he hears, that is folly and shame to him.

Proverbs 18:13

That is not aimed at you here, it is aimed at the conversation ahead, but read it in the ten minutes before and it does something useful. It gives you permission to walk in still listening, rather than walking in with your defence already loaded. Most of us arrive at these conversations having answered in our heads long before the other person has said a word. Ask, in these few minutes, to be someone who hears first.

Praying for the person you're about to face, even the one you don't want to pray for

Here is the harder part. If this conversation involves someone who has hurt you, or someone you are afraid of disappointing, or someone you simply do not like very much right now, you may not want to pray for them at all. That is understandable and it does not need to be forced into something warmer than it is.

But there is precedent for praying for someone difficult on the way to meet them, and it does not require pretending everything is fine.

Jacob spent years dreading his brother. Esau had reason to want him dead, and Jacob knew it. On the morning of the meeting Jacob did something practical and something that looks like prayer at once: he arranged his family so the most vulnerable were furthest from danger, and he went ahead of them himself.