The Language You Cry In

He has lived here for eleven years and he prays in English.

That is not an accident or a habit. It was a decision, made early, in a rented room with a hot pipe running along the wall. He decided that if this was going to be his country then it would be his language, all the way down, including the part where a man talks to God. He learned the words. He learned the ones you use in a church here, which are not the ones you use in a shop. He got good at it.

He can pray in English in front of a hundred people. He has.

At ten past four on a Tuesday he is standing in his own kitchen with the light off, holding the edge of the counter with both hands, because the phone call came at half past eleven and his father is a long way away and the flight is not until Thursday.

He tries to pray.

The English is there. It is all there, the whole careful cabinet of it, and he opens it and every shelf is exactly where he left it, and he cannot lift a single thing off any of them. The sentences form and they are correct and they are made of wood.

And then, from somewhere under all of it, comes his grandmother's kitchen. Not a memory of it. The sound of it. Her voice going over a saucepan, the same three or four lines she said over everything, in Arabic, in a rhythm he could not describe to you and could not possibly forget, said over bread and over fevers and over a boy with a cut knee.

He says one of her lines out loud in a dark kitchen at ten past four.

And it takes him apart completely.

Afterwards he sits on the floor with his back against the cupboard and feels something close to shame, because eleven years of work went out of the window in four seconds, and what came out of him was a peasant grandmother's saucepan prayer in a language he does not use for God any more.

There is one word the Bible refused to translate

Come and stand in that kitchen with me, because there is something in the written word that belongs to you tonight and I do not want you to miss it.

Paul is writing to Rome. He is writing in Greek, to Greek speakers, about the deepest thing that happens to a person when God takes them in. And right at the center of the sentence he does something strange. He leaves a word untranslated.

You did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, Abba, Father.Romans 8:15

Abba. That is not Greek. That is the word a child used at home, in the house language, in the ordinary tongue of the kitchen and the yard, and Paul is writing to a city that did not speak it and he keeps it anyway. He will not smooth it out. He writes the household word and then, only afterwards, the translation.

Hear what that means about you, standing there with the counter in both hands. The written word says the Spirit of adoption cries out in the house language, and it says the crying is His before it is yours, so the four seconds that took you apart at ten past four were not eleven years collapsing. They were the Holy Spirit reaching past the cabinet and using the words that were nearest the floor of you. He knew where they were kept.

And notice the verb. Cry. Not compose. Not deliver. Cry is what comes out of a person when the arrangement of it is no longer being managed, and Scripture puts that verb in the mouth of the Spirit Himself, which means the unmanaged sound is not the failure of prayer, it is the fingerprint of the One praying inside you.

Now let us take the shame off, because it is standing on ground that Scripture does not give it.

You have believed that the careful language is the honest one and the old language is the retreat. But the Bible you read has an Aramaic word sitting untranslated in the middle of a Greek argument, and it has Jesus in a garden saying Abba out loud in the worst hour of His life, and there is not one line anywhere in the written word that ranks the languages of the people God adopted. The Spirit crying Abba in you is the same Spirit in every tongue, and He has never once asked a man to pray in his second best voice because his first one sounds like his grandmother.

Think about what she was actually doing over that saucepan.

She was not being quaint. She was doing what the church has always done: putting the same few sentences over everything, over bread and fevers and cut knees, until they were not something she said but something the room was made of. She was building a shelf near the floor of a boy who would need it in another country at ten past four in the morning, thirty years later, when everything higher up had gone out of reach.

That is not superstition. That is what Scripture means when it says to talk of these words when you sit in your house, and it worked. The proof is that you are still standing.

And hear this plainly, because it is the whole thing. You are not further from God tonight than you were on the platform in front of a hundred people. You are nearer, and the written word is what says so: the Spirit of adoption is crying in you, in the tongue that is under everything else, and the language of that cry is not the measure of your standing. Your standing was settled by an adoption, and adopted children do not audition.