A millennial at prayer
If you’re anything like me, you’ve hit a point or two in your walk of faith where you’ve come to a dead end. Everything is a mess. There are no words to begin to describe the despair you’re going through.
For me, this has been an ongoing struggle. Like so many Millennials out there, I am constantly wracked with the question of whether or not I am making the right choices. The world around us is changing faster than ever, and we are hit with constant questions that all lead to one ever important self-reflection: “Am I really, right now, who I want to be?”
The tension between endless self-love and constant self-improvement is potent to say the least. I am not where I want to be in life. Don’t get me wrong, I have a wonderful husband and a healthy, happy son, and much joy. I have friends, and a solid, loving extended family.
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But an event happened about a week ago that made me sharply realize that I am not where I want to be career-wise. Again, don’t get me wrong, the job I have is absolutely wonderful. I should want this job. This is everything I’ve always told myself I need from a job. So why do I want something more?
It would be one thing to say ‘oh I want to hop, skip, and jump into another career that will be sure to yield me the necessary 50k a year a young professional needs to survive’. But that is not the case – not by a long shot. I want to write. I want to write like I want to breathe. If the Lord took away my eyesight like he did that of the poet John Milton, then I too would dictate and beg someone to write it down for me. I want to get into a career that is extremely hard to break into and even harder to create a stable income for said wonderful husband and happy baby boy.
And because I am thirty, instead I hopped, skipped, and tripped into the pit of despair also known as, “if I don’t do it now, I will never do it!”
Said despair consumed me until I was in tears during Church. While everyone else was listening and singing, I was silently crying into my hands. I had so much on my mind, so much fear and anguish and anxiety, that I didn’t even know how to ask God to help me. For all the writing I want to do, I was absolutely dumbfounded with how to vocalize to God. How to beg Him for His help, for His guidance, for His wisdom.
Then I remembered something I have known my whole life – God is omniscient—all-knowing. He knows the secret desires of our hearts. He knows the thoughts broiling in my anxiety that I cannot even form into words. And so, I just started praying two words over and over: “You know.”
Because God does know. Because He has always known. When I don’t know what to pray for, He knows. When I cannot even start to try and explain myself, my sins, my doubts, He already knows. And what a relief that is! He is there. He knows the words I cannot begin to imagine.
I don’t know what the future will hold. I don’t know if I will ever be the full-time writer I want to be. But God knows. And whenever I feel the despair trying to pull me back into that pit, I pray “God, You know. Please help me … You know.”
If there is something in your life that troubles you, something you can’t quantify or verbalize, something so big and complicated you can’t even explain it to anyone, join me in that prayer. Our Heavenly Father knows. We don’t have to know the words to pray, but I still believe that I just need to pray, and He will know.
Surely this is something of what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with “groanings that cannot be uttered.” (Romans 8:26) So when words won’t come, you can still say, “Father… You know…”
