At nineteen she could go for an hour and not notice.
She is not romanticizing it. She has checked herself on this, because she knows what memory does, and it is not a trick of memory: there are people still alive who were in those rooms and one of them mentioned it to her at a funeral last year without knowing what he was doing.
An hour. Out loud, on her feet or on the floor, and the words came the way water comes.
She is fifty-one now and last Thursday she got up early on purpose, which she does not often manage, and sat down in the front room with the light on and everything in her wanting to pray.
And what came out was a sound.
Not words. Not even the fragments she has been getting used to. Just a long low sound from somewhere under her ribs that she was embarrassed by even alone in her own house, and she stopped it, and then it came again, and she let it that time.
Twenty minutes. That was the whole session. One sound, twice.
And she got up and made the tea and went to work, and she has been carrying something all week that she has finally put words to, which is this: I used to be able to do this.
Not resentment. It is more like standing next to a photograph of yourself.
She has been quietly grading a fifty-one year old woman against a nineteen year old, on a scale the nineteen year old invented, and losing.
And that is you in your own chair at six in the morning, or you would not still be reading.
The sound you were embarrassed by is the one Paul names
Here is the verse, and I want you to sit with the specific noun in 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
Groanings.
Not petitions. Not intercessions in the tidy sense. Paul, who could write Greek well enough that people have been studying his sentences for two thousand years, reaches into the bottom of the language and comes up with the sound a person makes when they cannot manage a word.
And he does not put it at the shallow end. He says too deep for words, which means it is under them, beneath the place where language operates, at the level where the actual weight is.
You are not below prayer. What came out of you on Thursday is what Paul calls the deepest praying there is. It is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26), and too deep is the phrase and it is a direction. The Holy Spirit is the One making that sound in you and He was not embarrassed by it in your front room.
Now the comparison, because that is the actual wound here and it is not the praying.
You are measuring yourself against a nineteen year old.
I am not going to tell you the hour was shallow. It was not. God was in that room and those people were right about what they saw and I would not take one minute of it off you.
But hear what you are doing. You are treating fluency as the scale, and fluency is what a nineteen year old has because a nineteen year old has fewer things that will not go into sentences.
At fifty-one you are carrying people you could not have imagined at nineteen. Some of what is in you now genuinely does not fit through language, and the reason it comes out as a sound is not that you have less. It is that you have more.
You have not lost ground since you were nineteen and you are not a diminished version of her. It is written that we do not know what to pray for as we ought (Romans 8:26), and the not knowing gets larger as a life gets larger. The Holy Spirit meets that with a deeper form of prayer and not a lesser one.
And there is one more thing, and it is about the twenty minutes.
You have decided that one sound twice is a poor session.
Your twenty minutes on Thursday was heard in full and nothing in it needed translating. 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 was understood perfectly by the Father, and the Father was not comparing it to 1994.
So sit down in the front room and let the comparison go.
You are not going to get the hour back this morning by wanting it, and nobody here is going to hand you a way to build it up again, because you are not short of will and you never were.
You are going to turn both hands over, palms up, and say nothing at all for one breath. No sound either, this time. Just one breath.
Not to still yourself. Not because silence works. There is no technique here, there are no levels, and a woman of fifty-one with a sound is not scoring under a girl of nineteen with an hour.
You are not being graded against a nineteen-year-old, and the hour was never the measure of anything. 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 prays according to God's will and not according to a duration.
You are going to say nothing for one breath because Somebody in that room is already interceding, and for the length of one breath you are going to let Him have the floor.
You are being prayed for at the level where the weight actually is, and you were on Thursday too. It is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26). The Holy Spirit was in that twenty minutes doing the deepest work in the passage, and He is in this one.
Then make the sound if it comes. Let it this time.
It is not what is left of your praying. It is the floor of it, and the floor was always there.
You have a floor under your praying that did not appear when the hour went and cannot go when the sound does. 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), stated as the ordinary condition rather than as a decline. The Holy Spirit has been the floor of it since you were nineteen.
Declare this over yourself
Say them sitting where you are. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and that standing was given to you rather than earned in a room when you were nineteen. Scripture is the ground under every line and the Holy Spirit is what makes them live in a person. Whatever He does with the mornings from here is His, and the outcome is His.
- Woman I used to be at nineteen, you are not the measure of this and you never set the scale. It is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, and too deep is a direction and not a shortfall. He carries what I cannot say, and my prayer is heard now, wordless as it is.
- Verdict that twenty minutes and one sound is a poor session, in the name of Jesus you are thrown out of this front room. It is written that we do not know what to pray for as we ought, and the not knowing grows as a life grows. The Holy Spirit meets that with a deeper prayer and never a lesser one.
- God, You searched my heart on Thursday and there was a sound in it and no words at all. It is written that the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to Your will, so it arrived understood and needed no translating. I am not a diminished version of anybody, and the floor of my praying was always there.
Romans 8:26
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