Early-morning groans

Morning is the great human dividing line. We’re either roosters or slugs (or somewhere between). Aging has shifted me toward the “slug” side, although some mornings I wake up before the roosters and decide to keep going anyway.

That’s what happened the other morning. I eased into my favorite chair, turned on the heating pad for my back (doc says I have arthritis there, oh joy), and opened my Bible to read Psalms 5. Long ago I’d memorized Psalms 5:3 in the King James Version: “My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.”

Well, we got the “in the morning” right, like 5 a.m.! As I re-read this psalm, my memory replayed the Maranatha scripture praise song of the 1970s based on it that began, “Give ear to my words, O Lord, consider thou my meditation.”

Meditation? Just what did the psalmist mean by that? Today we hear “meditation” a lot in connection with Eastern religions, even though the Biblical sense of it is ruminating on scripture, like a cow with its cud. I stopped to explore the word.

Other Bible versions render that word: “groaning” (NAS); “sighing” (Holman); “lament” (Today’s NIV, 2005); “sighing and groaning” (Amplified); “ramblings, groans and sighs” (The Message).

Vine’s Concise Dictionary of the Bible said the word in Hebrew, hagah, means “to meditate, moan, growl, utter, speak.” The author added: “This word means to think about something in earnest, often with the focus on thinking about future plans and contingencies, possibly speaking to God or oneself in low tones.” He added that hagah is an onomatopoetic (“sounds like”) term, reflecting how people of ancient times sighed or made low sounds while musing. By the way, hagah also expresses a lion’s growl (Isaiah 31:4) and a dove’s “coo” (Isaiah 38:14).

I’m not one of the “ancients,” but I can understand hagah. After reading my Bible, I open up my prayer notebook. I often groan over the names on its pages. Some are battling cancer or other serious diseases. I pray for women seared by a spouse’s rejection. Others have baffling and troubling needs, like being “stuck” in life. Still others refuse to see their need for Christ. Sometimes I can only say a name then wait in silence as I ponder the mind of God on this person’s behalf. At such times I cherish the promise of Romans 8:26, that when we’re unsure how to pray, “the spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” He gets the prayers, even our groanings, through.

By 6 a.m. the sun had risen, a fitting metaphor for the light that a brief word study had cast for me upon this particular verse. I’ve now written “Heb: hagah=groaning, sighing” in the margin of my Bible to remind me that the word translated there means more than the King James Version rendering of “meditation.” “Groaning, sighing” also fits the message of the psalm, which wrestles with the pain of living among arrogant and evil people.

What comfort to know that God doesn’t expect me to pray eloquently-worded prayers. Sometimes I just groan, and He understands.