When the Words Run Out

Eleven chairs, dragged into a rough circle, in a room that still smelled of the coffee somebody had made too strong at seven.

They went round. That was the format, and nobody had ever voted on it, it had simply become the format, the way things do. The woman on the end prayed for her sister's scan. The man in the cardigan prayed a long, well built prayer with a shape to it, the kind that arrives somewhere. A student prayed nine words and it was the best thing said all evening.

Then it came to her.

She had been rehearsing since chair four. She had a whole thing about her son, and the thing under the thing, which she was not going to say out loud in a circle of eleven people. She opened her mouth.

"God, please."

And then nothing. Not a pause for effect. Nothing. The sentence had ended and there was no next part, and the silence went long enough to be a silence, and she felt the whole room being kind about it, which was somehow worse.

She said, "sorry," and looked at the carpet, and the circle moved politely on to the next chair.

She drove home certain of one thing: that everybody else in that room had something to say to God, and she had run out.

That is not what happened. What happened in that chair is written down in a letter Paul sent to Rome, and it is almost the opposite of what she thought.

Prayer does not run on vocabulary

Here is the verse, and it was written for exactly that chair.

The Spirit comes alongside us in our weakness. We do not know what to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.Romans 8:26

Read the middle of it again. We do not know what to pray. Not the beginners. Not the weak ones at the back. We. The man who wrote that sentence had planted churches across an empire and he put himself inside it.

So the moment you have been treating as your failure is the moment the verse is actually about. You did not fall out of prayer when your words gave out. You arrived at the place the verse describes, and something happened there that you could not hear.

Look at what the sentence says is going on in that silence. Not that God graciously overlooks a bad prayer. Not that the Spirit waits for you to compose yourself. That the Spirit is praying. Right there, in the gap, in groanings too deep for words, which is the honest phrase and worth sitting with: there is a kind of praying that runs underneath language and gets there first.

Which means the end of your vocabulary is not a wall. It is a handover.

And you arrived at the place the verse describes rather than falling out of prayer. The written word puts we do not know what to pray in the mouth of the man who planted churches across an empire, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to somebody who has read one silence as a failure.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word says the Spirit Himself maketh intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, and the Spirit is the one doing it rather than waiting for you to compose something.

And this is where the ninth gift on that famous list belongs, held gently, in its right place. Some believers find that the handover comes with a sound: a way of praying in a language they never learned, given by the Spirit as He chooses. It is one of the gifts, listed among the others, distributed by Him and not earned by anybody. It is never a rank. It is never a test you passed or failed. It is never the proof of anything about you, and the same letter that names it also insists that no part of a body gets to tell another part it is not really part of the body.

You do not need it to be praying tonight. You have never needed it to be praying.

And nothing about you is under review for the night your words gave out. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to somebody who has carried a verdict since a circle or a corridor or a car park.

What you need to know is smaller and steadier than that. When you have nothing left to say, you are still praying, because the praying was never being carried by your sentences in the first place.