No Words Left For This One

Mairi can pray about anything else and she cannot get a sentence out about this.

It is one situation. It has been going for six years. And she has prayed about it, at a rough estimate, several thousand times, and she has said it every way a person can say a thing.

She has asked plainly. She has asked at length. She has argued. She has been reasonable about it, and then unreasonable, and then reasonable again. She has offered God every framing she can construct, including two she is not proud of.

And about eight months ago she opened her mouth about it and there was nothing there.

Not despair. That would be a thing with content. What she has is the specific experience of a person who has genuinely exhausted the language available to her for one subject, and who now finds, when she goes to that subject, that everything she reaches for has already been said and has the sound of having already been said.

Everything else is fine. She prays about other people, about ordinary things, about her sister, and words arrive without difficulty.

It is only this one, and it is the one that matters most, and she has been silent about it for eight months and has not told anybody that either.

She is forty-four.

You may know that silence.

Maybe you also have one subject that has used up its vocabulary. Maybe everything else still works. And maybe the fact that everything else works is what makes this one feel like a verdict.

Somebody reports being worn out by his own praying

There is a line in Psalm 6 that is unusually physical about what long praying does to a person.

I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.Psalm 6:6

I am weary with my groaning.

Not weary with the situation. Weary with the praying itself. He is reporting exhaustion caused by his own asking, and he is reporting it to God, in the middle of the asking, as part of the record.

And nobody edits it out. It is not presented as a failure of stamina or as a stage he should have got past. It is simply what happened to a man who prayed about one thing for a long time.

Which means running out is a documented state rather than a departure from the normal one, and the person it happened to was not doing anything wrong.

And you are worn out by the asking rather than failing at it. The written word records exhaustion caused by praying, in the first person, kept in the text, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman eight months into a silence she has told nobody about.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word says the Spirit helpeth our infirmities, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, and the Spirit is the one who takes over exactly at the point where a person's own language gives out.

Why this one and not the others

Now the thing that has made this feel like a verdict, because you noticed it and it has been doing damage.

Everything else works. Only this is silent.

That looks, from inside, like evidence about the subject. As though the words have been withdrawn from this one thing in particular, which would mean something.

It is not that. It is arithmetic.

You have prayed several thousand times about this and a handful of times about most other things. Language is finite; any subject exhausts its available formulations if you go at it long enough, and no other subject in your life has had anything like this volume applied to it.

The others still work because they are not worn. That is the whole of the difference, and it is a fact about frequency rather than about God's attention to one thing.

And the silence is about frequency rather than about the subject. The word puts weariness in the mouth of a man praying about one matter at length, and the Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary rather than significant.

And nothing about you is under review for eight silent months. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has not been able to tell anybody about this.

What is available when the words are gone

This is the point of this whole category and it is exactly what you are standing in.

The gift is not a better vocabulary. It is not a more effective way of saying the thing. It is a way of praying that does not require you to have anything left to say, which is precisely the position of somebody who has said everything.

And it is not a test and it is not required and it is not evidence of anything about you. Nothing here says you must have it, and nothing here ranks anybody who does above anybody who does not, and if you do not have it then Romans 8 is still true about you and the Spirit is still interceding for you in the same situation with the same groanings.

But if you do, then what you have been treating as an ending is the exact circumstance the thing exists for.

And you are permitted to pray without words for the subject that has used them all. The word describes intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, which is language that has gone past language, and the Spirit is the one who does it rather than requiring you to supply anything.