All I Have Got Is Please

He has knelt on the same side of that bed since 1986 and the carpet shows it.

Not out of piety. He would want that said. It is a habit that started because his knees were younger than the rest of him and he found he thought better down there, and it stuck the way a thing sticks when nobody is watching it.

He prayed properly for a long time. He is a plain man but he is not an inarticulate one, and if you had listened at that door in about 1998 you would have heard a farmer going through his day out loud with somebody, in order, unhurried, the way he would talk to a man he trusted in a yard.

That has gone. It went slowly and he could not tell you when it finished.

What he has now, most nights, is one word.

Please.

That is it. He gets down, and his knees complain the way they do, and what comes out is please, and then a long time of nothing, and then sometimes please again.

He is not in a crisis. That is the strange part and it is why he has not mentioned it to anybody. There is no disaster in that house. His wife is well. The place is not in trouble. If you asked him what he was asking for he could not tell you, and that is precisely the thing that has been getting at him.

He has decided, in the quiet way a man decides things at fifty past ten at night, that he has stopped praying and started making a noise.

That a man who used to go through his whole day with God and now says one word into a duvet has come to the end of something.

And that is you at your own bedside, or you would have shut this by now.

What is underneath the one word

Here is the sentence, and I want you to notice that Paul does not treat it as a bad day.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.Romans 8:26

Look at the problem Paul actually names, because it is your problem exactly and he says it without any embarrassment at all.

We do not know what to pray for as we ought.

You could not tell me what you are asking for. You said so yourself. And you have been treating that as evidence that the praying has failed, and Paul puts it down as the ordinary condition of every praying person, including his own.

You are not making a noise, and not knowing what to ask for is written into the passage as normal. It is written that we do not know what to pray for as we ought (Romans 8:26), and the sentence has no rebuke anywhere in it. The Holy Spirit is the One Paul says is already covering that, and He has been doing it on that carpet since 1986.

Now the second half.

The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

A groan is not language. That is the whole point of choosing the word. Paul could have said prayers, or petitions, or utterances, and he did not: he reached for the sound a person makes when what is in them will not fit through a sentence.

You are not below the level where prayer works. You are at the level where He is working. It is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26), and too deep is the direction Paul chose, not too small. The Holy Spirit is praying underneath your one word, and He is not waiting for you to build it back into paragraphs.

And I want to say something about the word itself, because you have been dismissing it.

Please is not nothing. It is the shortest complete thing a person can say to somebody they trust. A man who says please to another man is not asking for a specified item. He is putting himself in that man's hands and letting him decide what is needed.

You have spent forty years learning that man well enough to stop itemizing.

You are not further from Him at one word than you were at the whole day out loud. It is written that your Father knows what you need before you ask Him (Matthew 6:8), which is a sentence about a Father and not about efficiency. The Holy Spirit is carrying what you cannot specify, and the Father was never waiting on the specification.

Now let me be careful about one thing, because a man in your position will start looking for the fault.

I do not know what the last few years have been in you. Nobody writing anything does. This page is not going to tell you that the change is growth or that it is a warning, because both of those are guesses dressed up, and you deserve better than a guess.

You are not required to account for it for the praying to be real. It is written that the Spirit helps us in our weakness (Romans 8:26), and helps is what somebody does when they take the other end of a weight without discussing it. The Holy Spirit did not stop and ask you to explain yourself first.