When I Don’t Know What to Say

Sometimes we are at a loss for words. Talking to somebody, we can’t quite figure out what to say. Only later, looking back, do we see clearly what might have been said. But at the moment we felt tongue-tied.

That happens when it comes to praying.

Our fumbling for those words may go back a long time. I’m thinking of the time my son Micah was little. He battled chronic ear infections back then. The allergy-related fluid in his ears made it hard for him to hear words clearly. Micah was slower to pick up words. He wanted to talk, but his lack of vocabulary frustrated his attempts.

We noticed this especially when we had nightly family prayers just before the boys went to bed. His difficulty made his part in the ritual a challenge. All the more when he took his turn after his highly verbal older brother, Abram, who managed to include in his asking, it seemed, all his friends and neighbors and family.

But Micah so longed to participate that he bowed his head and prayed in an unrolling string of wordlike sounds. He piled syllable on syllable.

He wasn’t articulating real words, as far as we cold tell, or completely formed sentences, but his praying had all the rhythm and inflection of real language. He was solemn, sincere. What he offered was beautiful to witness.

The problem was, in the dark of the boys’ room, Jill and I sometimes had to suppress an impulse to laugh. But then mostly we felt quiet awe, sensing we were in the presence of something holy.

For all my adult ease with language, I am sometimes like Micah when it comes to praying. So perhaps are you.

Words don’t always come easily. We don’t quite know how to give voice to our complicated emotions. And we struggle with this question, too: What should we pray for?

Or we wonder, Is it okay to ask for answers? To bring to God specific requests? How can I pray with trust when feeling anxious? We don’t always exactly muster elegant, high-flying prose. We feel uncertain, tentative, hesitant.

Or we might sit down to pray and feel not exultation and elation but mostly a dull emotional ache.

I’ve found help in all this in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans. The Holy Spirit, Paul said, “helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought” (Romans 8:26, NRSV).

Here the apostle captures not just the old struggle of not quite knowing what to say, but our hesitancy and uncertainty about the whole climate of prayer.

Suleika Jaouad faced a cancer diagnosis and was trying to figure out how faith could make a difference. She had had a complicated religious upbringing, leaving her with lots of questions. She wrote, “I didn’t know how to pray, or to whom, but this much was clear: I needed all the help I could get.”

Yes, we feel we need it all. But sometimes we don’t know where to begin and how to make room for it.

Paul does more than acknowledge the struggle; he also offers hope: “We not know how to pray as we ought,” he says, “but … the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” With groans that arise from deeper places than where our minds form mere vocabulary.

And God comes close and joins our attempts. No prayer of ours goes unassisted. Isn’t that an astonishing thought?

If we have offered ourselves to God, if we have opened our hearts for Christ, if his cross has redeemed us, the Holy Spirit invests himself in whatever we try to get out.

God through his Spirit prompts us, guides us. And the Spirit even intercedes for us.

Prays for us. In other words, there’s effort on the other side of the conversation. There’s activity from above in the equation. God moves in and through our words. Paul even goes on to say the Christ intercedes for us, as well. It’s not all up to us!

If I mentioned earlier how sometimes we talk we stutter and stammer in all kinds of ordinary human circumstances, most of us have also known that sudden sense when our words are lifted out of ourselves: I mean that speech we need to give in class, the eulogy we offer, the defense of someone whose vilified we step up to give. We get overtaken by an eloquence we could not have manufactured by ourselves. We’re swept up into a larger flow of inspiration or longing.

That can happen when we pray.

For God, rich in wisdom, becomes part of our efforts. The Holy Spirit coaxes and guides and inspires. “God,” Paul reminds us, “who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit,” and helps us!

We can, in other words, stop straining. Worrying so much. We let God pray through us.

And the outcome of that insight can be simple. Some years ago, struggling during a prayer time, I realized, that I could pray about my praying. I could begin not with fully formed prayers, but with a request for God’s accompanying me.

“God, help me to pray,” I realized, is a fine prayer. I could lean on God, seeing prayer not as something up to me to get moving. If it’s God who invited us to pray in the first place, we are always and everywhere replying.

We finally stop second-guessing what we ask for. We simply come. We speak. We try. And wait in anticipation for what might happen.

Tim Jones