When Prayers Are Mostly Groans

When my youngest son was two years old, chronic ear infections filled his ears with fluid, dulled his hearing, and slowed his mastery of speech. Micah wanted to talk, but a lack of words constantly frustrated his attempts. This made his part in our family’s nightly bedside prayers a trial, especially when he took his turn after his highly verbal five-year-old brother, who included in his prayers plenty of his friends and cousins.

But Micah so yearned to participate that he bowed his head, folded his hands, and prayed in what can only be described as an unrolling string of word-like sounds and syllables. His praying had all the rhythm and inflection of real language. In the darkness of the boys’ room, his solemn efforts left us all alternating between stifled laughter and awe.

Not long after witnessing Micah’s mumbled praying, our family moved to a big-city suburb to gather a new congregation and build a new church. Sent off with the good wishes of friends, confident of our gifts and pastoral training, my wife and I went with high hopes. But almost as soon as we arrived, the city’s oil-industry economy dried up. People in our church moved away in search of jobs. We realized that our fledgling venture was heading toward disappointment.

During that difficult time, I would sometimes awaken in the mornings with a dull emotional ache. Sometimes the best I could bring to my daily prayers was a groaning spirit. No eminently quotable lines here. Just a heartfelt reaching out for comfort in words that, should anyone have overheard them, fell short of articulate.

For all my adult facility with language, I was then and sometimes am like Micah when I pray. Words do not always come easily for expressing the complex emotions that swirl within. “I want to pray,” I hear people say, “but I have trouble finding the words.” Or like the anxiety a writer feels when faced with a blank page, the prospect of addressing God can make us freeze up. We get “pray-er’s block.” 

But much that is profound can happen in such times. “Your thoughts don’t have words every day,” wrote even the articulate Emily Dickinson. And when it comes to prayer, our spiritual impulses don’t always need words either. “The best prayers,” said seventeenth-century writer John Bunyan, “often have more groans than words.” Stumbling and stuttering need not make any of us feel like second-class pray-ers.

For all their roughness, both Micah’s praying and mine plumbed depths that polished phrases can never touch. Who knows how much Micah made up in sincerity what he lacked in fluency? And I remember my dark time those years ago as a time of growing depth and intimacy with God—even without the elegant words. 

 Adapted from The Art of Prayer: A Simple Guide to Conversation with God

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash