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THE LANGUAGE OF TROUBLE

- Eugene Peterson

Brief, urgent, frightened words—a person in trouble, crying out to God for help. The language is personal, direct, desperate. This is the language of prayer: men and women calling out their trouble—pain, guilt, doubt, despair—to God. Their lives are threatened. If they don’t get help they will be dead, or diminished to some critical degree. The language of prayer is forged in the crucible of trouble.

Language gets its start under the pressure of pain. Our first sound is the wail. All our early speech is an inarticulate eloquence that gets us what we need to survive: food, warmth, comfort, love. We need help. We need another. We are unfinished creatures requiring complex and extensive assistance in every part of our being, and a language is the means for getting it.

Prayer, a human being conversing with a holy God, is a great mystery and defies probabilities. But it is a mystery embedded in something common and very close to us. The nature of language provides insights into the learning and practice of prayer.
 

The primal language of trouble forges our prayers.

Lord, I come to you with my pain and my words tangled together. Hear me, O God, and help. Amen.