Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words. – Romans 8:26 (NRSVUE)
Covid finally caught me for the first time, more than three years into the pandemic. I thought I was vaxxed and ready for whatever she’d dish out, but within hours of tumbling into her thorny embrace I found myself in the ER late at night, weeping on a gurney.
Breathing was a struggle. My fever topped 103 degrees Fahrenheit. Muscles I never knew I had were screaming in pain. My brain was a cackling villain, telling me terrible and untrue things. Nurses kept coming in, calling me the wrong name, and retreating without offering care or even the basic Paxlovid prescription I had come in requesting.
I stood outside my own body and chided myself, “Why don’t you pray? Aren’t you the one always saying that prayer changes things?”
But I couldn’t pray. All I could muster was a moan. A series of sighs. And the aforementioned weeping.
It occurred to me: maybe all these sounds coming from my body are prayer. The only prayers I can pray. The Spirit knows how to be my sigh-translator to God’s switchboard. Even if all the Spirit is doing is sighing even more loudly.
Whatever you are going through today or any day: pray as you can, not as you can’t. Spirit is standing by.
Prayer
Moan. Sigh. Cry. Amen.
