Much of our praying is the tears torn from a heavy heart. When we experience grief we know not how to pray, we only feel in our hearts the burden of suffering and the anxiety of our helplessness. That prayer is a kind of empty hole pierced into our sides by our suffering. It is what Paul calls the unspeakable groanings (Rm 8:26), which arise from us in the midst of the trouble that God sends us. This is not inarticulate babblings as is sometimes thought, because Paul tells us that these groanings are not uttered, because they are unspeakable.  A husband feels this as he kneels at his dying wife's bedside, his welling eyes covered by impotent hands as her life ebbs from a long battle with cancer. What more can he say to God? What plea or petition has he not offered? His heart sobs out the prayer heard only by God, "Let Your will become my own and let me believe it good."

The great saints of the Bible often find themselves groaning inwardly like this with brief grief-laden petitions. This is not what we expect of the heroes of the faith, however. We expect virtuous stoicism and triumphant praying. Yet they are believers like us whom God tests with great trials and afflictions, again not for His information, but for their growth in faith, that they might conform their will to His own and call it good and gracious. In like manner, Christ Himself prays in the Garden. He knows what the will of God is, that He should suffer and die for the sins of the world on the cross. He prays that He would conform His will to God's will and call it good (Lk 22:40-44). On that Friday, which we call good, Jesus called God's will very good. In the Garden, as He groaned out His prayer it was articulated by the patter of blood-laden sweat, feeding with His life the ground that Adam had poisoned by His choice of His own will (Gn 3:5). Who had greater faith than this man, who did God's will in agonized death? Yet He prayed in groanings that received the pierced side and from that hole was drained from Him the flood that answered every groaning prayer uttered by those who believe in Him.

We do not despair when we are reduced to sobs of grief from the heart, any more than the groans of Jesus on the cross were expressions of unbelief. We abandon ourselves to the One who can alone save us, just as He once did (Heb 5:7). So prayer may not always be articulate, let alone prim and proper or stoic and triumphant. Weakness gives forth the best prayer because we have a God is strong to save those who are too weak to know how to pray.