The quietest prayers often come right before the hardest phone calls.

When something is genuinely at stake, the performance drops out of how you speak. The long careful sentences go first, then the vocabulary, until what is left is a few plain words or no words at all. That stripping down is not a failure of prayer. It is usually the most honest version of it, and it tends to show up in hospital corridors and parked cars.

If you are facing a conversation you dread, give yourself half a minute of quiet before it. Say the short true thing rather than the composed one.