I Sat Down And Nothing Came

The room is completely quiet except for the fridge, which starts up in the kitchen and then stops again.

She has been in the chair by the window for nineteen minutes. She knows it is nineteen because the clock on the shelf is the kind you can hear, and she has heard all of them.

She sat down to pray. That was the plan, and it was a good plan, and she has done it in that chair most nights for a long time. She closed her eyes. She waited for the first sentence to arrive, because it always used to arrive, unasked, the way the first line of a letter does when you know exactly who you are writing to.

Nothing came.

Not doubt. That is what she keeps trying to explain to herself. She has not stopped believing anything. She is not angry with God and she has not decided He is far away. It is more literal and more embarrassing than any of that: she opened her mouth and there was no language in it. Like reaching for a name you have said a thousand times and finding the shelf empty.

So she tried the old things. She started with thank you, because thank you always works, and got about four words in before it went thin in her mouth and she stopped. She tried saying the name of somebody she loves, which usually opens the whole thing up, and it sat there on its own in the quiet. She tried the words she learned as a child and they came out flat, and she stopped because saying them flat felt worse than not saying them.

And now it is nineteen minutes and she is a woman sitting in a chair in the dark, being quiet, which is not what she came to do, and underneath it a small verdict is forming that she cannot quite look at: something has gone wrong between me and God, and the proof is that I have nothing to say.

Now let me stop calling her she.

Because you have that chair. Maybe you are at the end of a year that took more out of you than you have told anyone about. Maybe you have prayed so many words about one particular thing that the words have gone smooth and meaningless, like a coin rubbed blank. However it happened, you sat down to pray and there was no language in you, and you have been treating that silence as evidence.

Stay where you are. Nothing here is going to ask you to speak.

Who is doing the praying

I am not going to give you words to say. Let me put that down at the start, because you are braced for a list, and the bracing is heavier than the list would be.

Nobody here is going to hand you a method, or a pattern, or five things to pray when you cannot pray. And nobody here is going to suggest that the silence in that chair means anything has gone wrong between you and God, because it does not, and He has not moved, and He does not come and go depending on how a week went. That is the fear underneath the whole thing and I want it named and taken off you early.

Here is what is actually true, and it is the whole message.

You have been assuming that prayer is something you produce. That is a reasonable assumption. It is how it has always felt: you arrive, you find the words, you offer them up, and the finding of the words is your part of the arrangement. So when the words are gone you conclude, quite logically, that your part has failed and therefore nothing is happening.

But there is a sentence in the letter to the Romans that quietly rearranges the whole picture, and it was written for exactly the person sitting in that chair.

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, verse 26

Read the middle of that again. We do not know what to pray for as we ought. That is not describing a bad night. That is describing all of us, always, as the normal condition. Not knowing what to say is not the exception that proves something has broken. It is the ordinary human situation, and it was written down as such by a man who prayed a great deal.

You are inside the verse and not outside it, and not knowing what to pray is the condition it names. It is written that the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought (Romans 8:26). The Holy Spirit helps in that weakness rather than waiting for it to clear.

And then read what happens about it. The Spirit himself intercedes. Not: the Spirit helps you find better words. Not: the Spirit tops you up so you can manage your side. He does the praying. There is prayer going up out of your front room tonight, and it is being carried by Someone who knows exactly what you meant, in a language deeper than words, and He started before you sat down.

You have prayer leaving your front room tonight that you did not have to produce. It is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26), and Himself is Paul naming who does the work. The Holy Spirit started before you sat down and did not stop when you ran out.

Groanings too deep for words. Sit with that phrase for a second, because it tells you something enormous. What you are carrying is not too small to say. It is too big. The thing you could not get into a sentence is being expressed right now with a fullness that no sentence could have held anyway.

You have the thing you could not say being carried up in a fullness no sentence would have held. It is written that He intercedes with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26), where too deep is a statement about size and not about failure. The Holy Spirit is expressing tonight what you could not get out.

So the nineteen minutes were not empty. They were the loudest prayer you have prayed all year, and you were not the one doing the heavy lifting, and that has always been the arrangement.

You are not the one holding this arrangement up and you never were. 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 prayed through all nineteen of those minutes.