Too Tired To Pray

There is a chair by a window in that house, and for about nine years it was the best room in the world.

Not a special chair. A wide old armchair with a worn arm and a blanket over the back, angled at the window because the light came in at an angle in the mornings and there was a tree. She sat in it at ten past six with a cup she rarely finished, and she talked to God, and it was not a discipline. It was the part of the day she looked forward to. Her list lived on the sill. Names on it going back years, some crossed out because they had been answered, some crossed out for sadder reasons, a few names on it so long they had faded into the paper.

She still sits in the chair.

That is the thing nobody sees from outside. She gets up at ten past six and she sits down in the same chair, and now it is the worst ten minutes of her day. Nothing comes. Not doubt, not anger, not some dramatic dark night of the soul she could at least write about. Just a flat gray nothing, like reaching for a light switch in a room where the power is off. She says the names and hears her own voice saying the names. She gets to the end and cannot remember starting.

And then she gets up feeling worse than when she sat down, which is a particular kind of cruelty, because this was the one thing that used to help.

You know it, or you would not still be reading. Perhaps yours was not a chair. Perhaps it was the drive, or a church on a Wednesday, or a walk you took with your headphones out. It was working. It carried you through a hard year, maybe several. And now the tank is not low, it is empty, and the thing that used to fill it has stopped filling it, and you have quietly begun to wonder whether it was ever real or whether you were just younger and had more energy.

So let me say the thing you are braced to hear, and then never say it. You are not going to be told to try harder here. Not a longer quiet time. Not more discipline. Not a suggestion that you have drifted and need to come back. You have nothing to give and I am not going to ask you for it, because asking a person who is empty to produce something is how empty people get shamed into pretending, and there is no shame mechanic on this site.

Sit down in the chair. Do not do anything in it.

Somebody is already praying in that room

Here is the sentence that changes the room you are sitting in, and most people have read it a hundred times without noticing what it says.

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

Take the word helps, because it is not a vague word in the original. It is a long compound that means to take hold of a thing together with someone, from the other end. It is the word you would use for the second person under a heavy table. Not calling out advice from the doorway. Not coaching. Under it, at the other end, lifting.

Then take we do not know what to pray for as we ought. Paul does not write that as a confession of failure. He writes it as a plain description of the human situation, his own included. Nobody knows how to pray as they ought. Not the person in the chair at ten past six with a list, not the apostle, not anyone. The difference between your good years and this one was never that you knew how.

And then the last part, which is the one that ought to loosen something in your chest. The Spirit himself intercedes. Himself. Not you, harder. Not you, with better technique. There is praying happening in your room that is not being generated by you and does not run out when you do, and it has been going on all the way through this flat gray season while you sat there hearing your own voice and concluding that nothing was happening.

Something was happening. It was simply not being done by you. That is not a downgrade. That is the arrangement.

Groanings too deep for words. Notice that this is what the deepest praying sounds like. Not eloquence. Not a full paragraph. A sound with no words in it, which is exactly what you have been producing in that chair and grading yourself down for.

You have been sitting in a room where prayer never stopped, marking yourself absent.

There is one more thing to say, and it is about God's manner with exhausted people, because you may be expecting Him to be disappointed. Elijah, at the end of himself, lay down under a bush and asked to die. Heaven's response was not correction. He was allowed to sleep. He was fed. He was allowed to sleep again. Then he was fed a second time, and only much later was there a conversation. Nobody said one word about his prayer life.

He is that gentle with you. He is not standing at the window with His arms folded waiting for you to become impressive again. He is at the other end of the table, lifting.