“I love the LORD, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications. Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long as I live.”
— Psalm 116:1-2 (King James Version)
You know the feeling. It's late, the house has finally gone quiet, and you say the smallest prayer there is — barely words at all, more like a breath aimed at the ceiling. Maybe it was in a hospital corridor, or in the car before an interview, or standing at the sink after a phone call you didn't want to take. You didn't have anything eloquent. You just needed to be heard.
What the psalmist gives us this morning is not a lesson on how to pray but a discovery: someone was listening. "He hath inclined his ear unto me." Picture that — not a distant deity keeping records, but a Father who bends down, the way a parent kneels to catch the whisper of a tired child. The love in this verse doesn't come first as a duty. It comes as a response. I love, because he heard.
St. Augustine, the fourth-century bishop who spent a restless youth chasing everything but God before pouring his heart out in the Confessions, understood that our longing is itself an answer to God's prior reaching. As he taught, our hearts are restless until they rest in God — meaning the ache that sends us to prayer was placed there by the One we're aching toward. You were leaning in because He leaned first.
Centuries later, Charles Spurgeon, the great London preacher of the 1800s, offered a plain and freeing thought about this very psalm: that God's hearing of our prayer is reason enough to keep praying forever. Notice the psalmist's conclusion — "therefore will I call upon him as long as I live." One answered prayer became a lifelong habit. Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish reformer who wrote so tenderly about the interior life, described prayer simply as friendship, spending time often and alone with the One we know loves us. Not performance. Friendship.
So carry this into your day: your unpolished, half-finished prayers are not falling into silence. You do not need the right words, only an honest voice. The God who inclined His ear yesterday has not turned away today. Speak plainly. Speak often. And let the smallness of your prayer be no discouragement — it is, in fact, exactly what love sounds like when it knows it is heard.
A Prayer for Today
Lord, thank You for bending close to hear even my quietest words. When I have no eloquence, remind me that You listen for the honest voice, not the perfect one. Because You have heard me before, I will keep calling on You — today and all my days. Amen.