I'm sitting in tears trying to pray - trying to untangle my thoughts which are, as usual, twisted and knotted and unruly. Like the disciples, I don't know how to pray - it seems I always end up here, not even knowing how to begin. The metaphor of tangled threads shapes my request - I am tired of confusion and lack of direction - I want things to be clear, simple, straight - untangled. So I ask God to untangle my thoughts, to sort them out, to separate them. But then a nagging thought occurs - perhaps that is not the right way to pray . Perhaps I should ask God to weave them into a beautiful tapestry instead, perhaps that is what He wants to do. . . like that old metaphor popular during my Bible college days. Which is the right way to pray?
And then I reflect that I am thinking, praying in metaphor anyway. My thoughts are not actual threads, are they? Does it matter how I talk about them? And should I pray in figurative language at all? But can I even begin to speak to God or anyone else about my present difficulties without any figures of speech? All this runs through my mind within sixty seconds of my first whispered request. By now my prayers have been completely derailed - another metaphor. Should I just start over and forget the metaphor altogether?
I step back mentally and try to think what I know of God's "speech" as He has accomodated Himself to man. He appears to love figurative language; He repeatedly chose poets to write His message. The canon we have accepted is full of symbolism, metaphor, anthropomorphism. Is there, I wonder, a single literary device discovered by man that cannot be richly illustrated from the Bible? And what about visions? God often "talks" in pictures, even - to Abraham, to Ezekiel, to the minor prophets, to John the Apostle, to Peter. The Scriptures are full of stars and sand and wheels and dry bones, of watered gardens and stony ground, of tarpaulins full of animals and of weird, frightening beasts. He certainly has no hesitation about using metaphor in His own communication to us.
But, returning to my original prayer, my problem is that I don't know how to think about things anyway - what if I choose the wrong metaphor. What if I ask Him to untangle when I should ask Him to weave, or to dissolve, or to secure the knots more tightly - or . . . the possibilities are endless. Now I am really not sure what I want to ask for, anyway. I cast about for anything in the Scripture that might inform or instruct me.
I recall the admonition in Ecclesiastes 5 to "Be not rash with thy mouth.. . .let thy words be few" and wonder if it is a rebuke. But I am also encouraged by the behind-the-scenes glimpse into the mechanics of prayer that the Apostle Paul provides in Romans 8:26, 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. Can I trust the Spirit to translate my prayers, however dim or ill-chosen the words, or even the thoughts?
I remember the word picture David used once to describe his posture before the Lord, "Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child." and I think that perhaps what I need to do this morning is just to sit quietly and wait for the Lord to make sense of what I cannot make sense of - to be like Hagar who found herself in the desert, found by "Him who sees me." Maybe the right words don't matter so much. Maybe they don't matter at all this morning.
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