The Prayers of Not Knowing

It must be true that God sometimes speaks so softly that the sound of His voice is sensed, but the words are too faint to understand.  It becomes a strange moment of knowing and not knowing.  We know His presence.  We know there is something unique about the moment of revelation, but it is more a sensory knowledge than one that is visual or auditory.  We cannot argue ourselves out of the awareness that God is near and speaking to us.  It is something experienced and known more out of faith than certainty.   

It is the kind of spiritual intuitiveness which came to Cornelius and Peter before their encounter in the centurion's home.  Both were in separate places when the Spirit broke into the ordinariness of their day.  The first movement of the Spirit alerted Cornelius of Simon Peter's presence in Joppa.  Before the messengers of Cornelius arrived, Peter who was in Joppa on a roof top was brought by the Spirit into a puzzling moment of heightened awareness and expectation.  (Acts 10) What neither of them knew would happen at the sunrise of that day was a holy rendezvous which was first experienced in the spirit and required each to act out of faith that was operating not on the basis of what was known, but what was sensed at a level that was beyond understanding.  

When we come into those moments of knowing something so deep in our spirit that we do not have the words to speak of it, it may be the Spirit praying within us in the way spoken in Romans. "Likewise, the Spirit  helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs to deep for words."  (Romans 8:26).  There are certainly times when the Spirit works in the heart we have given to Him to lead us into the unknown will of God.  In those moments we know His presence and we know He is seeking to lead us, but knowing is beyond what we can know.  In such times we pray not because we know, but because we have faith in the One who is speaking to us out of holy mystery.