You have been trying to hear God.
You have read the verses. You have sat in the quiet. You have done the practices the Christian books recommend. You have listened, as hard as you know how, for the still small voice. And the static has not cleared. The interior noise of your life, the anxiety humming in the background, the long lists, the recurring worries, the residue of a hundred other voices that have spoken into you, has been louder than anything you have been able to discern as his.
You may have started, quietly, blaming yourself for the static.
Surely a more faithful believer would hear him by now. Surely a deeper walker with God would not have to strain like this. Surely the problem is that you have not done enough of the right kind of listening.
David, in Psalm 143, offers a different way to pray.
Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul (Psalm 143:8).
Read the verb again.
Let me hear.
David is not promising he will listen harder. He is not committing to a more disciplined quiet time. He is asking God to do the active work of making the hearing happen. The Hebrew construction is causative. Cause me to hear. The petition is for God to reach into the soundscape and turn the volume up himself, because the supplicant cannot, by his own effort, clear the channel.
This is a prayer for an external intervention.
It is the prayer of someone who has, finally, given up on the idea that he could hear God by trying harder. He is asking God to do something the supplicant cannot do for himself.
David prays this prayer in the middle of one of the most depleted psalms in the Psalter. Earlier in Psalm 143, he says, my spirit grows faint within me; my heart within me is dismayed (Psalm 143:4). He is not, in this prayer, fresh. He is not, in this prayer, well-resourced. He is at the end of his own capacity. He has nothing left to strain with.
If you have been in a long hard season, you know this place. The interior nervous system has been worked too hard for too long. The energy required to strain forward, to focus, to attune, to listen carefully for something faint, is energy you no longer have. The well-meaning Christian advice to spend more time in the Word, listen more carefully in prayer, sit quietly until you hear him lands on a body that cannot, today, do any of those things.
David is praying for the believer who is in this exact place.
Cause me to hear. The hearing is not something I can manufacture. You will have to do it.
This is one of the most pastorally honest prayers in the Psalter. It admits, in advance, that the supplicant does not have the resources for the spiritual work being asked of him. It hands the work to God. It says, in effect, if I am going to hear you this morning, you are going to have to make it happen, because I do not have it in me.
If you have been straining, you can stop.
The straining is not, in this season, the practice. The petition is the practice. You ask. You ask him to cause you to hear. And you let go of the responsibility for the hearing happening on your own steam.
This does not mean you stop opening the Bible. It does not mean you stop praying. It means you change what those practices are for. You do not open the Bible in order to manufacture an encounter. You open it as a way of being available to him in case he chooses to speak. You sit in the quiet not because you are going to extract a word from him by sheer concentration, but because you are placing yourself in a position where, if he decides to make himself heard, he can.
The work, in this prayer, is his.
And the timing is his. Let me hear in the morning. David is asking for a specific moment, but he is not, in the verse, controlling when that moment arrives. He is making himself available in the morning and trusting that what is meant to be heard will, in some form, be made hearable. He is not, in his exhaustion, pretending to be in charge of the schedule.
The result, when it comes, will probably not be loud. It will not, most likely, be the parted-sea version of hearing God. It will be the small movement of the master's hand, in the language of Psalm 123. A verse you have read a hundred times that, today, lands. A line from a song that, today, carries weight it did not carry before. A friend's text that arrives at exactly the right moment. The quiet sentence that surfaces in your chest, unbidden, on the walk home. The hearing comes in a register the static cannot drown, because the One causing the hearing is the one who built the ears.
If you cannot, this morning, strain to listen, you do not have to. The prayer is shorter than that.
Cause me to hear.
The hearing, when it comes, will be a gift.
