Broken Prayers

Riley Clemmons opens by naming the performance she's been taught to give: "hold it together, make the bad look better, say all the words that I'm supposed to, bow my head, say 'Amen,' yeah, that'll do." It's a precise description of prayer as a script, and the song spends its first lines admitting the script has never actually been honest.

What follows is a turn toward something closer to Romans 8:26, where the Spirit intercedes for believers with groans words can't articulate: "You want my tears, every messy word, every scar and every fear... You don't care if it ain't poetry." The song isn't asking for eloquence to be replaced by nothing — it's asking for eloquence to stop being the requirement at all.

The image that closes the second verse — "mascara running down my face, desperate cry in a dark place" — is about as unpolished as prayer gets, and the song insists that's exactly where God meets a person, not despite the mess but because of it. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, which is the whole case this song makes for bringing broken prayers instead of finished ones.