I get scared when I pray to God.

The very sound of my own prayers—spoken aloud, whispered in my heart, or scratched onto paper—makes me uncomfortable. They expose me. They strip away every excuse I have carefully dressed myself in.

It feels wrong to remember God only after I have dug myself into a ditch.

Worse still, it feels pitiful that the closest thing to honesty I seem capable of offering Him arrives only when everything else has collapsed.

When life is calm, I speak to Him. When life is burning, I speak honestly.

That observation has haunted me for a while.

A few days ago, I found myself overwhelmed. Something inside me simply said,

“Pray.”

I refused. It didn’t feel fair.

If I were God, I would have thrown my own prayer requests straight out of the windows of heaven. Let them crash into the earth below. Let the sound of them breaking echo back to the sender.

Because I know me. Oh how I knew the pattern far too well.

The moment the crisis passes, so does the urgency.

The moment I can stand on my own feet again, I begin acting as though I built the ground beneath them.

And when I do pray during those seasons, I often wonder who is actually speaking.

Me? Or the version of me that knows the right Christian words?

Sometimes my prayers feel rehearsed. Like performances. Not conversations.

Somewhere along the line I learnt how to sound like a believer without necessarily speaking like myself.

Eventually, I gave in. Not because I suddenly became holy. Because every other option had failed.

Desperation has a way of making prayer feel less like a religious activity and more like breathing.

Something strange happens to me during those desperate prayers.

The performance disappears.

I stop trying to sound wise. I stop trying to sound grateful. I stop trying to sound patient.

Instead, I arrive exactly as I am.

Angry. Confused. Proud. Selfish. Afraid.

Those prayers are ugly, raw. They wander. They spiral.

I begin talking about one thing and somehow end somewhere completely different.

They become wild. Then venomous. Then something close to poison.

Not because I am trying to insult God, but because I stop filtering myself.

I say things I would never dare say in front of another Christian.

Things that, had they escaped my mouth in the stories of old, I imagine would’ve earned me lightning long before I reached “Amen.”

Yet…

God listens. That is the part I cannot quite understand.

Not that He answers. That He listens.

I hate the way I sometimes pray to Him. I have genuinely tried to change it.

I’ve tried praying to Him about ordinary days. Small joys. Funny stories. Nothing dramatic.

But somehow my anger always steals the steering wheel.

My disappointments become backseat drivers. Old wounds begin giving directions.

Before long, I am no longer having a conversation with God.

I am introducing Him to every unresolved part of me.

Sometimes I let those parts speak because they tell the truth I am too embarrassed to admit.

Not the objective truth.

My truth.

Exaggerated. Emotional. Often unfair and one sided. But honest.

So…

Do I pray? Yes.

Do I perform? Far more often than I would like.

Lately, though, I have been trying something different.

Talking.

I realized if I just talked, it would filter the religious anxiety and anger out, and I would be honest.

I’m not writing this because I’ve figured prayer out.

Quite the opposite.

I’m writing it because, after watching the pattern repeat itself enough times, I finally noticed it.

And perhaps noticing it is where change begins.

-END-

From the table of the "Friendly Poet", Chinonso Achugbu