25 February 2017

When you have no words for prayer.

A violent gust of wind snatches everything out of my hands before I can arrange it into any semblance of order.

A host of tiny letters dances through the air, flung hither and thither by the breeze, black marks printed on a grey page of clouds. Some scatter across the grass, others fly up into the swaying branches of a nearby tree where they catch amongst the bare twigs and riotously flutter out of reach. In the midst of the type characters, I watch whole words pitching up and down high above my head, dispersing chaotically, and colliding senselessly into one another. Dry leaves of paper are tossed into the atmosphere. Torn pages blow in every direction like small tumbling birds, wings powerless to direct their flight.

I stretch my arms out, leaping and grabbing in an ineffectual attempt to retrieve the jumble of letters, words and paper scraps but they lurch further into the sky, well beyond the reach of my fingers.

I shout in frustration but I am robbed even of wordless sound as it too is seized instantly by the wind and flung aside like winter debris.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot catch all the fragments whirling round about me.

If I could just gather them all together in one place out of this wind, I can perhaps begin to figure out how to stitch them into comprehensible sentences but the wind is far too strong. Everything eludes my grasp.

As I stand buffeted and bewildered, I suddenly notice the man. He is seated on the ground beneath the tree. I hadn’t seen him before, having been too busy in my frantic activity. As he sits, he calmly plucks letters and words from the air, capturing them in his hands. The wind whips his hair across his face and as he tilts his head sideways to shift the strands, he looks up at me and smiles. He doesn’t speak, but simply carries on effortlessly catching words. My words. One by one, the pieces are carried by the turbulent currents towards him and into his hands where they remain, no longer affected by the wind.

The scene ends there, just a brief flare of the imagination. A thought that drops into my mind as I attempt to pray one day. An attempt that feels just like chasing words in the wind. 

The cross winds of life can make prayer a difficult and sometimes impossible task for us. How do we order everything that we are thinking and feeling into words that can be called prayer?

What a relief to picture Jesus smiling his reassurance to us.

‘It’s all right, I’ve got this. Stop trying so hard and instead trust what I can do. I’m out here in the wind with you even though you didn’t notice me. I am your prayer maker.’

It’s OK that we don’t know how to pray sometimes. Jesus will write our prayers for us. He knows us far better than we can ever know ourselves anyway and he knows that when stormy winds blow in our souls, we need his help. We can stop being so hard on ourselves. We can stop reaching and struggling. If you don’t have words for your heart, then simply bring your heart. Jesus takes the heavy sighing efforts of our souls and makes them pure expressions of prayer..



‘Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, 
God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along.
 If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. 
He does our praying in and for us, 
making prayer out of wordless sighs, 
our aching groans.’
Romans 8:26 (Msg)




Perhaps when strong soul winds are swirling words beyond our grasp, the best thing to do is go and sit beside Jesus under the tree and rest knowing that he has it all under control. Wordlessly sit in a posture of prayer and allow his Spirit to suffuse us with peaceful reassurance. 

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