I Can Pray for Anybody but Me

Somebody asks her to pray and something happens in her that she cannot explain and would not want to make sound impressive.

Words arrive. Not clever ones. She has never had a great vocabulary for this and she does not do the voice that some people do. But she knows what to say and where to go and when to stop, and she has watched things shift in rooms while she was speaking, more than once, in ways she cannot account for.

She is forty seven and she has been doing this since she was twenty two.

Here is what has been happening for about two years, and she has told nobody, because it is the sort of thing that would worry people who rely on her.

When she prays for herself, she goes blank.

Not distracted. Blank. She sits down with the intention of it, and there is a full stop somewhere behind her eyes, and after a while she gets up and does something else. It has happened enough times now that she has stopped attempting it most days.

She has run the possible explanations. Unconfessed something. Pride. A hidden thing she is avoiding. She has been through all of that carefully and honestly and has not found it, and the not finding it has become its own kind of worry.

What frightens her, and she would use that word, is the arithmetic of it. If the thing she is best at in the world stops working the moment it is pointed at her, then something about her is different from everybody she prays for.

The sentence, unsaid: I am the one person I cannot get to.

You may know that full stop. The thing you can do for anybody, and not for yourself.

The verse is written for people with no words

There is a sentence in Romans that is about exactly this and it is one of the most under preached lines in the letter.

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

Read the premise Paul builds on. We know not what we should pray for as we ought. He does not treat that as a crisis or as a symptom. He states it as the ordinary condition of a believer and then builds the whole comfort on top of it.

And then look at who acts. The Spirit helps. The Spirit intercedes. The whole of the activity in that sentence belongs to God, and what the person contributes is a shortage.

You are inside the exact condition that verse assumes, and Romans 8:26 begins from not knowing what to pray and makes the Spirit the one who does the praying, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from the densest chapter in the letters and lands it on a woman going blank in a chair.

Groanings which cannot be uttered

Consider the phrase Paul reaches for, because it is a strange one and it is doing precise work.

Groanings which cannot be uttered. Not eloquence. Not fluent prayer in a heavenly register. Something that by definition does not become words, going on in a person who has no words.

Which means the state she has been reading as an absence may be the exact thing being described. She goes to pray, nothing comes, she concludes nothing is happening. Paul says something is happening and that its distinguishing feature is that it does not come out in language.

You have been reading a full stop as an empty room, because the written word names unutterable groaning as intercession rather than as silence, and the Spirit of God is what turns that from an exegetical point into something that changes a Tuesday afternoon.

And notice the word helpeth. In the Greek it is a word about taking hold of something alongside somebody, the way two people lift a thing that one cannot lift. It is not a replacement. It is a second pair of hands on the same load.

You have somebody with hands on the other end of it, and Romans 8 describes the Spirit taking hold alongside a person rather than instead of them, and the same Spirit who is doing the interceding is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one person

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Twenty five years of praying for other people, with two years of nothing available for herself and nobody told, is more than one person should be carrying alone, and saying so is not a criticism of how she has carried it. Tell a doctor plainly what the last two years have been like, including the blank, because a persistent shutdown of something a person could always do is worth a real conversation with somebody trained. Ask about a counselor, who can hold what she has been holding for a whole community. And find one person, outside the room she serves, who prays for her by name on a regular basis, and ask them directly rather than hoping.

And if the blank has begun to come with something heavier, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Asking somebody to pray for her is not a demotion. You are held exactly as much in the week you cannot pray as in the week the words come, because Romans 8:26 puts the interceding in the Spirit's hands and the shortage in ours, and it is His Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than only in theory.