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.
Yes to all of this. Love.
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