Some years, some decades, some careers, some lifetimes ago, a kid would have favorite bands. They would release albums, go on tour, and eventually release a live album. A kid would listen to the albums thousands of times, until every detail of every song was essential. A song could not have been played otherwise anymore than snow would fall in August.

At the concert, the music was so loud and so thunderous that the details were lost. One could tell the song wasn’t played the same way as on record, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Usually, one couldn’t really say, and who is the kid to give these giants advice about the finer points? If they played a song he didn’t really like instead of one of his favorites, maybe the kid should think about that.

The kid grows old listening to the albums, the studio recordings and the live recordings, and sometimes wonders how the band could have made some of their bad decisions about how to perform their own songs. The singer should have stuck to the recorded version, for instance, although one can see how the live version would have seemed more exciting to the audience, who might think the singer could show more spontaneous passion live than he would have in the studio.

That’s the chaos of life. One has the studio version of prayer, the Scriptures, the controlled environment, to carefully phrase a perfect formula for a prayer request. One can dispassionately evaluate alternatives and decide what the best self would do, how the unprovoked self would behave, but you look around at your life and there are always things that would never have seemed plausible. What prayers could you have said that God might have answered so things would have turned out differently? It’s never that simple.

One has to perform in life, and when the heat’s on, under the spotlight, facing a skeptical, not always friendly, sometimes even hostile audience, it’s a hard-pressed person trying to hold onto those good resolutions made in the quietness of prayer.