In devotional literature, one sometimes reads of “a life of prayer.” That does not go far enough. Life is a prayer, or perhaps a curse. Whichever it is, God hears what a person’s whole life is saying.

Most of us do not, and those who do frequently try to spin their life’s message to make it sound right and reasonable. But God has no problem understanding what a person’s life is saying. He hears our real voice.

What does God hear people say in their real voice? Some say, “Leave me alone.” Others, parroting Eden’s serpent, say, “I would be like God.” Still others repeat idiotically, over and over, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.” On the day of judgment, the real message of our lives will be dug out of us, and it will be clear, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the prayer our lives have been repeating all along.

That prayer might contradict the prayers our mouths speak. Take the Lord’s prayer as an example. Though we may say, “Hallowed be thy name,” our lives might demand, “Honored be my name.” We might pray “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” when our life is saying, “I want him to pay.” We might intone, “Lead us not into temptation,” even while our life chants, “Get me as close to temptation as possible.”

This idea that our life can speak a different message than the one our words convey is present throughout the Bible. Though we will be judged by our words, as Jesus stated, he made it clear that judgment will not be based on our carefully crafted words but on our careless ones. They are the ones that reveal the true message of our lives.

This is not hypocrisy, at least not as usually understood. It is not about deceiving but about being deceived. When I play golf, I really think (I’ve concluded this is a form of insanity) that I am as good as my best shots. I’m the golfer who hits the ball 250 yards down the middle of the fairway. But that’s not the real (or, to be more precise, the complete) me, as anyone who’s ever played golf with me knows. For every shot that lands 250 yards down the fairway there are two in the woods, a half-dozen in the rough and one in someone’s front yard.

In the same way that I overestimate my golf ability, I overestimate my holiness. I quickly forget my failures, evil thoughts, and unkind words, and assume that I am as good as my best prayers and most pious feelings. Now God does take note of our prayers and pious feelings, but he sees them for what they are: a part of the whole. They are a few lines in an enormous manifesto.

How can our lived prayer be aligned with our spoken prayers? When we trust God in spite of the trials and temptations that have left us bruised and weary, when we fight to believe God, holding on by our fingertips to faith, that’s when we become something we could never otherwise be: ourselves. That’s when the voices of our lived prayer and our spoken prayers converge and become one.

St. James addresses these issues in a warning to the “double-minded.” We think of the double-minded person as someone who can’t make up his mind, but that is not exactly what James meant. He was thinking of a person whose life says one thing while his words say another. His mouth says, “Thy will be done,” but his life says, “My will be done.”

A life that communicates a different message than one’s words is a problem for everyone – for the pastor and the parishioner, the sinner and the saint. It is our life work, in a sense, to bring our lived prayer and our spoken prayers into alignment. As the two converge, we will begin to see many more answers to prayer. More importantly, our life will become the answer to a prayer we might not have even known we were praying.