I Am Praying For Two

Six years of it now.

In the car, mostly, and sometimes at the sink, and once a week in a room at church where you do not say what you are actually praying about.

A promise made in front of God is what all of it is about, and six years is a long time to hold a promise up on your own in a car.

And in the last year something has changed in the praying itself. It has gone thin. Not angry, not doubting exactly. Thin. The words leave and there is no sense of anything on the other end, and you have started to wonder whether you have been talking to yourself in an empty car for six years.

Before anything else, the thing that comes first on this row.

If the person you live with frightens you, controls you, hurts you, or has made you smaller and more afraid than you used to be, then none of what follows applies and I am not going to wrap it in the language of promises. That is not a marriage kept alone. Nobody who cares about you would tell you to keep absorbing it. Talk to somebody qualified where you live, this week, and if there is danger in that house, contact an emergency service or a domestic violence line today.

For everybody else, this is about the specific exhaustion of praying alone about a thing you cannot discuss with anybody.

Somebody is making the words

There is a verse in Romans 8 that describes something happening underneath a person's praying, and it is exactly aimed at where you are.

the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered (Romans 8:26, King James Version)

Read what that assumes. It assumes a person who has run out of words. The verse before it says plainly that we do not know what we should pray for as we ought.

That is not a rebuke. It is a description, offered without any embarrassment, of an ordinary condition. And the answer to it is not better praying. It is somebody else doing it alongside.

You are not the only one praying about this house, and Romans 8 has never once left a person to carry an intercession alone. Romans 8:26 has the Spirit Himself making intercession where the words have given out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does exactly what that sentence describes in a parked car.

And notice the phrase about groanings that cannot be uttered. What is being carried in that verse is precisely the thing you cannot say. Not the tidy prayer. The one underneath it that has never been put into a sentence.

You have had the unsayable part carried the whole time, and the word has never once required you to find words for it first. The passage puts the intercession in the Spirit's hands with no vocabulary required, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been doing it at the sink for six years.

Thin is not the same as empty

Let me deal with the thinness directly, because it has been read as evidence and it is not.

Prayer goes thin for reasons that have nothing to do with whether anybody is listening. It goes thin with tiredness. It goes thin with repetition, because the ninetieth time a person says the same sentence it stops carrying what it carried the first time. It goes thin when the subject is one that never resolves.

Six years on one unresolving subject would thin anybody's praying. That is not distance from God. That is what happens to language.

And here is the part that matters most. The verse in Romans is not describing prayer that feels full. It is describing prayer that has run out, and it says the carrying continues underneath it.

You are being prayed alongside at the exact point where your own praying gave out, and the giving out has never once been the end of it. Romans 8:26 has the intercession arrive precisely where the words fail, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it going when a person can no longer feel it happening.

You were keeping a promise and praying about it alone for six years, and no verse has ever once said that a thin prayer is an unheard one. It is written that the Spirit makes intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, and the Spirit of God is the one who is carrying what a woman cannot say in a car.

Tell one person, and let them pray too

Here is the assignment, and it is the one this whole row gives, with one addition at the end.

Tell one person the truth about how alone this has been.

One. Chosen because they can hear something without instructing you. A friend, a pastor if that is a safe person in your case, a counselor.

You are permitted to let one more person carry some of this, and Romans 8 has never once put a whole intercession on one back. Romans 8:26 has the Spirit Himself making intercession where the words give out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been doing that in a car for six years.

And then, if it feels possible and only if it does, ask them to pray about it. Not with you, and not out loud in front of you. Just to pray about it on their own, in their own week.

That is a small thing to ask and it changes the arithmetic of six years.

You are able to let one other person carry some of this in prayer, and it has never once been required that you carry the whole intercession alone. Romans 8:26 puts the intercession in hands other than the praying person's own, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when somebody else starts praying about a house they have never been in.