I Cannot Finish A Sentence

She was taught to pray properly and she has never once been sorry about it.

Her grandmother did it. Out loud, at that table, every night, in whole sentences with a beginning and a middle and an end, and never long, and never showy, and always addressed to somebody rather than announced at a room.

She learned it the way you learn an accent. By eight she could do it. By fifteen she was the one asked to do it at family things, and she has done it at two funerals and one wedding and more Sunday dinners than she could count.

And she has kept it up privately for fifty-odd years. Not a performance when nobody is listening. Just the same shape: address, say the thing, finish.

It stopped about seven weeks ago.

Not the praying. She is at that table every night the way she has always been. What stopped is the sentence.

What comes now is pieces.

She will start, and get four words in, and the four words are true and then there is nowhere to take them. Or a name arrives with nothing after it. Or she says about that and stops, because He knows which one and she cannot face setting it out. Some nights it is one word twice.

And she has been sitting at that table for seven weeks with a growing and unspoken conviction that she is not really praying any more. That what she is doing is the residue of praying. That a woman who has prayed in whole sentences since she was eight and cannot now manage one has lost something and ought to know what.

She has not said this to anybody. Who would she say it to? She is the one people ask to pray.

And that is you at your own table, or you would have gone to bed by now.

The verse that assumes you will run out, and does not mind

Let me put the whole thing in front of you at once, because you have been carrying half of it.

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

Now, the phrase you need is the last one, and I want to take the shine off it first so that it can do its work.

Groanings too deep for words.

That is not describing an advanced spiritual state. It is not something people work up to. Paul is describing what is happening underneath every praying person all the time, and he calls it a groaning, which is the least impressive noise a human being makes.

A groan is what comes out when a sentence is not available.

You are held by a form of prayer that does not run on sentences and never did. It is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26), and too deep for words is Paul's own phrase and not a concession. The Holy Spirit has been praying beneath your grandmother's shape at that table since you were eight.

Now let me name the thing you have quietly concluded, because it is wrong and it needs saying plainly.

You think the sentence was the prayer, and the fragments are what is left of it.

Your four words are not the residue of a prayer. They are a prayer, and they are carried the same way the long ones were. It is written that we do not know what to pray for as we ought (Romans 8:26), which means the shortfall was always there, in the fluent years too, and was always being covered. The Holy Spirit was doing the same work under the whole sentences, and you simply could not see Him because the sentences were in the way.

That is the turn, and I want to say it once more because it is the thing you came for.

Nothing has broken. Something has become visible.

For fifty years you had a form that worked, and it was good, and it was your grandmother's, and there is nothing wrong with it. And underneath it the whole time was Somebody carrying what the form could not reach.

Now the form has thinned, for a season, for reasons nobody on this page knows. And what you can see through the gap is not an absence.

You are not further from Him at four words than you were at four sentences. It is written that He who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God (Romans 8:27). The Holy Spirit is understood by the Father without translation, and a fragment reaches Him already carried.

And I am not going to tell you what the seven weeks mean. I do not know. Nobody honest does, and a page that hands a woman a diagnosis of her own soul from a paragraph she wrote in her own head is a page to be careful of.

You are not required to produce a sentence tonight for the praying to be real. It is written that the Spirit helps us in our weakness (Romans 8:26), and helps is a word for somebody who has taken hold of the other end. The Holy Spirit is not waiting for the grammar to come back.