Praying in a Different Language

            One of my favorite tasks here at the hospital is helping with the chaplains, who are local volunteers who go around the hospital to talk with patients and pray for them.  It is sometimes really hard, because people are often sad, lonely, or hurting in a hospital, and it’s all a bit outside of my comfort zone.  I’m not a medical person, and just being inside of a hospital is a little weird and uncomfortable.  Then trying to meet people that I don’t know and understanding them and their pain in Arabic adds another layer of complexity.  I am always with another local volunteer who can help me with the Arabic when I get confused, which helps a lot. 

My first week here, I would offer to pray for patients with the addendum “mumkin ana aslaha likii bil inglesia?”  “May I pray for you in English?”  A wonderful little old lady in the dialysis ward told me that in Arabic or English, God understands.  Still, I wanted to pray for them in a language that they knew, because I would find it a little weird for someone to be praying for me when I couldn’t understand them.  I talked to one of the local volunteers about wanting to learn to pray in Arabic, and I tried praying for her in Arabic.  She said it was fine, and that from then on I should pray in Arabic.  No more learning needed.  So that was that. 

It can be hard to pray in a foreign language.  I mostly sound like a five year old.  I’m sure that a lot of the verbs don’t get conjugated correctly.  I probably use the wrong words sometimes, or just make up words altogether.  Sometimes the other volunteers have to help me with words in the middle.  Some things are just too complicated for me to communicate well in Arabic.

And yet, God understands me.  My prayers are slow and halting and might cause an Arabic grammarian to fall over faint, but I’m talking to my God, and he understands.   As a Christian, this is so important for me to realize and think about.  God always understands our prayers.  Whether they’re beautiful works of poetry that rhyme, whether it’s a simple song from a child, whether it’s a nonsensical mutter in a foreign language, whether it’s a groan and a plea that no human words could ever describe, God understands.  The patients seem to understand me too, and seem to be aware that I’m not a native Arabic speaker.  And no one has yet commented on the American woman who goes around praying in Arabic.

 I’m learning that many of the things I pray for aren’t really all that complicated.  Thank you God for this person.  Thank you for their life.  Please heal them.  Please give them peace.  Please help them, because you love them.  In the name of Jesus the Messiah, Amen.  The most complicated thing that I’ve prayed for was for someone’s daughters to find husbands, and that was only hard because I needed to use the rare feminine plural verb conjugation.  I tend to think that prayers need to be complicated and specific, and there is a time and a place for that.  But sometimes, simple works just as well.

A note on why I chose to pray the way I do, as opposed to just learning the Lord’s Prayer or another pre-written one.  I did this on purpose.  The Lord’s Prayer and similar ones have a great purpose: to help us as the church pray as a unified body, and to help us individually pray when we can’t find words to say.  These are very important, and if you don’t know any, I would recommend that you learn one.  But prayer is our opportunity to talk to God.  To say, “Hi Dad”.  I call my earthly father just to talk about what’s going on in life, and I can do the same thing with God.  Think about that.  The God who created heaven and earth is willing to sit and talk with you.  About great big important things, like wars and famines, but also about little things, like missing home and being tired and cranky. I want my prayers to not only talk to God about this person, but to give them an idea of how to talk to God.  That you can talk to God about anything.  Yep, God doesn’t mind hearing about hopes that your daughters will find husbands and that he will make dialysis less painful in the same prayer.  And that there is so much to thank God for, even when you’re in the hospital.

Hopefully, my prayers will improve in their grammatical structures (though I will never bother with trying to speak proper classical Arabic), and my topics of prayer will expand a bit with my growing vocabulary.  If you speak a second language, I encourage you to try praying in a different language.  Not as a grammar exercise, but as a faith exercise in really thinking about your prayers.  Maybe it’ll be beautiful and make your French teacher proud.  Or maybe it’ll wind up as “Hi God, thanks, bye.”  Either way, God understands you and is happy to hear from you.