I Do Not Know What I Would Ask For

He has got as far as opening his mouth four times.

Twice with the same man, who is patient and would have waited, and both times he closed it again and said something about the weather in a way that must have been obvious. Once on a telephone, where he had the advantage of not being looked at and it made no difference at all. And once, absurdly, standing in a line behind somebody he had decided to ask on the strength of about ninety seconds of a conversation, which he would now describe as the least characteristic thing he has done in a decade.

The problem is not nerve. He would want that established.

The problem is that he genuinely does not know what he is asking for.

He knows what he wants. He has known for about six years, in the way you know a thing in your chest before there is a word attached to it. And every time he has tried to put a word on it he has found that the words available all carry cargo he is not sure he means: they belong to particular arguments, and each one places him somewhere he has not decided to stand, and he is not the kind of man who says a word he has not weighed.

So he opens his mouth to ask a question that he cannot construct, and closes it, and talks about the weather.

He is forty-four. He reads more than most and it has been no help whatsoever, and possibly the opposite, because the more he has read the more he can hear what every available word is doing.

And there is a private and slightly bleak thought that has started arriving in the last year or so: a man who cannot say what he wants may not actually want anything.

Somebody has been asking on your behalf

I want to deal with the bleak thought first, because it has been arriving for a year and it is wrong in a way that can be shown rather than soothed.

A man who cannot say what he wants may not actually want anything.

Consider what would have to be true for that to hold. It would require that wanting is downstream of language: that a desire only properly exists once its owner can name it correctly. And nobody believes that about anything else. Every parent has watched a child want something desperately for months before acquiring the word for it, and nobody concludes the child did not want it.

You have known it in your chest for six years. The chest is not waiting on the vocabulary.

Now here is the verse, and I think it may be the single most specific thing in Scripture to a man in your position.

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 the middle clause slowly. We know not what we should pray for as we ought.

That is not describing a spiritual failure. Paul puts it in the first person plural and states it as the ordinary condition of believers: not knowing what to ask for is the normal case, and the whole verse is built as God's provision for exactly that.

And look at what the Spirit is said to do about it. Not teach the right words. Not wait for better ones. Maketh intercession, in groanings which cannot be uttered, which is to say in a form that has no vocabulary in it at all.

You have somebody making the request on your behalf in a form that does not require words, and that is not encouragement for a careful man, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is Himself both the subject of that sentence and the reason it is landing on the four times you opened your mouth.

Now let me say something about the cargo.

You said every available word belongs to a particular argument and places you somewhere you have not decided to stand. That is an unusually precise observation and it is correct: the vocabulary in this area is contested, and a careful man picking any of it up finds himself holding a position he did not choose.

I am not going to hand you a word. That would be me putting you somewhere too, and you would feel it within a sentence, and you have spent six years declining to be placed.

What I will say is that you do not need one in order to ask.

You are permitted to ask badly. Scripture says the ordinary condition is not knowing what to ask for as we ought, and the Spirit is the one who takes it from there, and there is no version of that verse in which the request has to be well constructed before it counts.

I want to say the practical thing, and then I am going to stop.

Say the chest thing rather than the word. Go to the patient man and say: there is something I have wanted for six years and I have not got a word for it that I trust, and I want to describe it to you instead.

That is a sentence you can construct, because it is about your actual position rather than about a contested category, and it hands the vocabulary problem to two people instead of one.

I am not naming who or where. You know that man and I do not.

You are not stuck at a gap in your vocabulary. The word says the Spirit intercedes in groanings that have no words in them at all, and He has been doing it for six years while you opened your mouth four times and closed it, and heaven has never once been waiting on you to find the right term.

You have somebody making the request for you in a form that has no words in it at all. Scripture says we do not know what we should pray for as we ought and calls that the ordinary condition, and the Holy Spirit is the one interceding in groanings which cannot be uttered.