Three Words and I Stop

Twenty to six, and the coffee maker is doing the last of its noise in the kitchen.

She is in the chair by the front window, the one that faces the street, with the lamp on low because the overhead is too much at this hour. Same chair for eleven years. There is a cushion at the small of her back that used to be her father's and a blanket over her knees that does not match anything in the room.

Outside, one set of headlights goes by and turns at the corner. The house behind her is asleep.

This is the hour she likes. She prays through it in the same order every morning, and the order is a comfort rather than a rule: her son and the job he did not get, the woman two doors down waiting on a scan, the girl at church whose father is drinking again, the roof, the water bill, the president. She is not in a hurry. She names them properly, one at a time, the way you would introduce people at a door.

And then she comes to the last one, which is always the last one, and which has been the last one since 2006.

Lord, about the.

Three words. And her mouth stops.

It is not a decision. That is the part she cannot explain to anybody, and has never tried. She has not decided to keep it from Him. There is no defiance in the chair. She opens her mouth on the fourth word and there is simply nothing there, like reaching for a step in the dark that turns out not to exist, and after a second or two she says amen and folds the blanket and goes to put the toast on.

She has tried it every way she knows. She wrote it down once and got the same three words onto the paper, then sat looking at her own handwriting until the pen dried out. She has tried it in the car with the radio off, and in the shower where nobody can hear, and in the third person, which lasted nine words and was worse.

Somewhere along the way she read that you have to be able to name a thing before God will move on it. That sentence has cost her more than the thing itself.

Twenty years in that chair. The list gets prayed. The last one gets three words.

And you know the fourth word, because there is one waiting for you too. Maybe not in a chair at first light; maybe in the parking lot before you go in, or in bed with your eyes open. Everything else gets prayed, properly, with names. And then there is the one, and something in your mouth closes, and you have carried the not-saying so long that the not-saying has become a second thing to be ashamed of.

What happens at the fourth word

Let me start by taking three things off the table, because any one of them left standing will make the rest of this useless.

It is not a demon sitting on your tongue, and it is not a generational curse worked down a family to land in your chair. It is not a failure of nerve either; you have faced things in that room that would have flattened people who talk more easily than you do. And there is no key. Nobody is holding a technique you have been too slow to find, and I am not going to end this page by handing you one and calling it freedom.

You are already fully known by the One you are sitting in front of, and the sentence you cannot finish is not news to Him. Psalm 139 says there is not a word on your tongue but He knows it altogether, and the Spirit who searches even the deep things of God did not learn what this is at the fourth word this morning. He has been in that chair with you for twenty years.

So what does happen at word four. Usually this: the thing is not a piece of information, it is a place in you where language never went, because it landed before you had the words for it or it took the words away when it landed. Speech is a late arrival in a human being. There are rooms in a person that were furnished before anybody taught them nouns.

You have never once been asked to produce the words as the price of being heard. That is not softness on my part, it is what Romans 8 actually says, and it is the Spirit and not your vocabulary who carries the praying that gets past the ceiling of a front room at twenty to six.

Groanings that cannot be uttered

Here is the verse this whole page stands on, and I would rather you heard it than heard me.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

Read what Paul admits in the middle of it. We do not know what we should pray for as we ought. Not the beginners. Not the weak ones at the back. Us. Him included.

You are covered at exactly the point where the words run out, and that coverage was designed in rather than improvised for you. The written word gives the groaning to the Spirit and not to you, and the phrase it uses, groanings which cannot be uttered, is a description of a prayer with no words in it at all. Yours is not a defective version of praying. Yours is the one the verse was written about.

And notice the next verse, because people stop too early. He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. So the prayer you could not say is not floating somewhere unheard. It is being made, at this moment, by the Spirit, in front of the Father, in a form that does not depend on the fourth word.

Twenty years of three words is not twenty years of silence. It is twenty years of a prayer whose opening line was the only audible part.

You do not have to be the one who finishes it

So what do you do tomorrow morning at twenty to six. Nothing new, is the honest answer. Say the three words. Then stop, on purpose this time, and stay there.

You have permission to leave the sentence open, and leaving it open is not the same as leaving it unsaid. His word promised a Helper and named Him the Spirit of truth, which means the quiet after the third word is occupied rather than empty. You may say Lord, You know the thing, and go and put the toast on, and nothing has been withheld from God.

And nobody here is going to require you to tell a human being. That has to be said plainly, because a lot of pages like this one end by making disclosure the toll on the bridge. It is yours. You get to choose the room and the hour and the person, or none of them.

That said, a person alongside you is one of the ways God works on a thing like this, never a way around Him, and it is worth knowing what the options actually are. A doctor, if this has gotten into your sleep or into your body. A counselor, which is a room built for a sentence that takes years to finish, where an hour spent not finishing it is not a wasted hour. A pastor. One friend. And if these early mornings have begun carrying the wish that you might not wake up for the next one, get to a person today instead of tomorrow: 988, which answers anywhere in the United States by call and by text, or the crisis line for your own county, and somebody near enough to sit in the room. Whatever this is, it was never yours to carry alone in the dark.

You have never once been the only one in that chair, and you were held through every stopped sentence, twenty years of them. Exodus 17:12 has two men getting under Moses' arms when his own strength for holding them up ran out, and nobody writing that down called it a failure of prayer; they called it how the day was won. Hands under your arms are the Holy Spirit's ordinary way of working, and He was already at it in 2006, before you knew what you would be needing.