Prayer before a difficult conversation: come unscripted

It is scheduled. You know the day, you roughly know the hour, and ever since you knew it you have been rehearsing. In the shower, on the way to work, in the small hours when you surface. You found a good line, you improved it, you have a second one ready in case.

What you are preparing is sentences. And a conversation can only be half prepared, because someone else is preparing the other half without consulting you.

What the rehearsal actually does

Look closely at the mental rehearsal. It does not train you against the person you are going to see. It trains you against a version of them that you wrote yourself, whose lines you supplied, and whom you beat every single time. That is restful. It is of no use on the day, because the real person never read the script.

Worse, after enough runs you are no longer going in to talk. You are going in to deliver. You are waiting for the sentence that will let you produce what you prepared, and until it comes you are not listening. You are watching for your cue.

Answering before hearing

Proverbs has a line for this, and it is harsher than you expect.

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

Proverbs 18:13 (World English Bible)

Notice what the verse says nothing about. Not the tone, not the volume, not even whether the answer is any good. The answer may be excellent. What is faulted is the order: it comes too early, and it comes too early because it was ready beforehand.

Notice too where the shame lands. Not on the conversation, not on the other person. To him. It stays with the one who answered.

Eleven verses earlier, the same chapter names the motive, and this is where most of us recognise ourselves.

A fool has no delight in understanding, but only in revealing his own opinion.

Proverbs 18:2 (World English Bible)

Put the two side by side. One describes what we do, the other why we enjoy doing it. The pleasure is not in understanding. It is in getting our own opinion out. Which is to say that wanting to win has a very ordinary name in Proverbs: preferring to reveal what you already think over understanding what you have not yet heard.

The answer does not exist yet

Paul gives the Colossians an instruction about speech, and the end of the sentence is the part nobody quotes.

Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one.

Colossians 4:6 (World English Bible)

Each one. Not everyone, not in general, not one good answer that works anywhere. The answer is fitted to the person who has just spoken, so it is found in the room and not before. A rehearsed line is an answer addressed to nobody.

That is why a prayer before a difficult conversation cannot ask for the right words. They depend on sentences that have not been said yet. What it can ask for comes down to two things: to walk in without your answer already written, and to know what you actually want on the way out.

A prayer before you go in

Here is a prayer written for this page. It asks neither for the right words nor for the other person to change.

Lord, I have prepared everything, and I know my lines by heart. You know what I am really going in for, and it is not peace. Let me walk in without my answer. Give me the patience to wait for the end of their sentences, including the unfair ones. If I am right, I can be right later. What I will not get to do again is the first minute. Keep me from wounding for nothing, and from going quiet where I should speak.

One thing to do before you open the door

Two gestures, and both of them fit in the corridor.

The first: write in one sentence what you want on the way out. One sentence, not three. There are only three possible answers, and they do not lead to the same place. Either you want it acknowledged that you were right, in which case the conversation is over before it starts. Or you want one precise thing, a deadline, a decision, a named apology, and you can ask for it plainly in the first few minutes. Or you want the relationship to hold afterwards, in which case today’s subject is not the most important thing that will be said.

The second: prepare a question rather than a comeback. A real one, meaning one whose answer you do not already know. If you know the answer, it is not a question, it is a trap, and the other person will hear it as one.

If nothing was scheduled and it rises all at once, this is not your page: the prayer for anger works on the delay you put between the surge and the first sentence. If the conversation is behind you and what remains is resentment, praying for someone who hurt you is a slower road. And if the room you are walking into is one where you are being assessed, the prayer before a job interview takes that fear, which is a different one.

Where this page does not apply

Everything above assumes a conversation between equals, between two people who can speak and can stand up and leave. Where you are afraid of the person who will be sitting opposite, where the meeting exists mainly to make you give way, none of this holds: arriving without a prepared answer is not a virtue there, it is a risk. Do not prepare that kind of meeting alone, and do not hold it without someone knowing.

If that is your situation, findahelpline.com lists free, confidential helplines country by country, including for people worried about someone else.