You Have No Words Left For Yourself

Ask her to pray for somebody and she will do it in thirty seconds flat, standing up, in a car park, with a bag of shopping in one hand.

She is famous for it in a small way. There are people in that town who have driven across it to be prayed for by her, and what they always say afterwards is the same thing: it was like she knew. She did not know. She listened, and something came, and she said it, and it landed on the exact bruise. That has been happening for nineteen years and she has never once got bored of it.

She has prayed over a woman in a hospital corridor while a machine went off behind a curtain. She has prayed over two men in a garage forecourt at midnight. She prayed for a boy last March who could not tell anybody what was wrong, and she got four sentences into it and he sat down on the curb and cried, and his mother rang her a week later and said it was the first crying he had done since October.

Nineteen years. Four hundred people this year alone.

And in April she sat down at her own kitchen table at ten past six in the morning, with the light coming through, on purpose, deliberately, to pray for herself.

She got as far as the word Lord.

Then she sat there for twenty minutes. Not distracted. Not busy. Fully present, hands on the table, entirely willing, and there was nothing there at all. It was not that she could not think of what to ask for. It was more that the whole apparatus that works instantly for everybody else simply did not turn over when she pointed it at herself, like a key going into a lock it does not fit.

She tried again on the Wednesday. Same. She tried in the car. Same.

And by June she had come to a conclusion about it, which she has told nobody, and the conclusion is this: something has gone. Whatever it was, it has been spent on four hundred other people and there is none of it left for her, and God can see the empty place where it used to be.

That is what she believes at ten past six in the morning, and it is not true, and I am here to take it off her.

Paul assumed the silence

There is a verse in Romans that people quote at the end of hard prayer meetings, and almost nobody notices what it takes for granted.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

We know not what we should pray for as we ought.

Read that as a flat statement of fact, because that is what it is. Paul is not describing a bad season or a backslidden believer. He is describing the ordinary condition of every praying person in the world, himself included, and he states it without a trace of alarm, the way you would state that human beings need sleep.

The not knowing is not the fault. The not knowing is the premise. And the provision for it is not a technique, it is a Person, who is already in the room and already praying.

So hear this over you at your own table. That twenty minutes was not empty. Not for one second of it. That is not my encouragement, that is what His word says is happening in exactly that silence, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who takes a verse like Romans 8:26 and turns it from a nice idea into a thing a woman can feel in her chest at ten past six.

Now watch what that does to April.

If prayer is something you produce, then a silence is an output failure, and nineteen years of fluency followed by nothing is a graph going down, and you can read the graph. That is exactly how you have read it. But if the Spirit is the one making intercession, then the silence you have been treating as evidence against you is a room with somebody praying in it, and He has been doing it with groanings that cannot be uttered, which is a phrase that means precisely this: there are no words available for it, and that is not the problem, that is the description.

You did not lose the thing. There was never a supply of it in you to lose.

I want to sit on that one, because it is where the guilt has been living. You have been carrying a private theory that what happens when you pray for other people is a substance you have, and that the substance is finite, and that you have spent it. Every word of that theory is wrong, and it is wrong in the most freeing possible direction. His word says the Spirit helpeth our infirmities, which puts the helping on Him and the infirmity on you as the normal arrangement, and the Holy Spirit has never once looked at a tired woman's silence and read it as a balance running out.

And look at what that means for the four hundred. Every one of those prayers landed because He was in them, not because you were full. The hospital corridor. The forecourt at midnight. The boy on the curb in March. None of that came out of a reserve, which means none of it took anything from you, which means the account you have been anxiously watching does not exist.

You are prayed for right now. Not when the words come back. Now, in the silence, by name, with a specificity you could not manage on your best morning, because Romans 8 says the Spirit maketh intercession for us and it does not add a clause requiring us to join in, and the Holy Spirit is doing it in your kitchen while the kettle is going.

Let me say one plain thing before we go on, because this is written to somebody running on nothing. If it has gone past tiredness lately, if the mornings have got darker than you would tell anybody, please do not sit with that on your own. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one real human being who can be with you before the day starts. That is not a failure in a woman of prayer. That is groanings that cannot be uttered getting a voice and a chair, and God is the one who put people in the world for it.