A request came in last spring that stopped me.
It was from a parent whose child had died. I won't say more than that about the specifics. The email was short — a few sentences, matter-of-fact in the way that people sometimes are when they're in the deepest grief, past the point of performing it. They weren't asking for anything specific. They just said they needed prayer and they didn't know who else to ask.
I opened my notebook to write it down and I sat there for a while without writing anything.
I'm not someone who believes prayer requires eloquence. Most of the prayers I pray privately are fragments, half-sentences, just names and the word please. I've never thought God requires full paragraphs. But in that moment I couldn't even get to a fragment. There was nothing in me that felt adequate to the weight of what this person had sent.
I've thought a lot about what I did next, because I think it was the right thing even though it felt like failure. I didn't try to construct the prayer I thought I should pray. I wrote the name down, and I sat with it. I asked, without words, for help that was bigger than what I could ask for with words.
There's a verse in Romans — the eighth chapter — about the Spirit interceding with groanings too deep for words. I've read that passage many times in my life and understood it abstractly. That afternoon I understood it differently. It felt less like a theological description and more like a practical promise: when you come to the end of what language can carry, you are not at the end of prayer.
I returned to that name in my notebook many times over the following weeks. The prayer got no more articulate with time. It stayed mostly wordless, more of a sustained turning-toward than a petition. I don't know whether that helped the person who sent the request. I hope it did. I have no way of knowing.
What I know is that it changed something in how I understand what I'm doing when I do this. Prayer isn't primarily about the words. The words are a way of directing attention, of holding something with intention. When the words run out, the attention can stay. That's not nothing. I've started to think it might be most of it.
If you're in a place where you don't know what to ask for, you can still send me a note. You don't need to have it figured out. You can just say where you are. I'll carry it from there.