Untranslated: Bringing Your Inner Life to God

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand. What is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

There’s a specific kind of loneliness Kafka expresses in that sentence.

Not the kind where you’re literally alone. The kind where you’re surrounded—texts coming in, meetings on the calendar, people who love you—and yet you feel untranslated. Like you’re speaking a language no one else can hear.

Have you ever been there?
Where you’re not even sure what you feel, just that it’s loud?
Where someone asks, “What’s wrong?” and you can only shrug because you honestly don’t know?

Most of us were taught to perform clarity.

To tidy up our emotions. To have the right answer. To keep it moving. And if we can’t explain what’s happening inside us, we assume something’s wrong with us. Like confusion is failure.

But confusion might be honesty.

Because your inner life isn't a spreadsheet. It’s more like weather. It shifts. It has layers. Sometimes there’s fog over something real. Sometimes you can’t “solve” it—you can only sit with it long enough for it to name itself.

And here’s the deeper thing: you are being formed—by something.

If you live in a world of constant commentary, instant reaction, and endless noise, you’ll start to believe that the goal is to figure yourself out as fast as possible. Label it. Post it. Move on. Be efficient, even with your soul.

But Jesus doesn’t treat your interior life like a problem to fix.
He treats it like a place to meet you.

There’s that line in the Psalms: “Search me, O God, and know my heart… see if there is any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139). Notice the posture. It’s not, “Let me explain myself to you.” It’s, “You come in. You search. You name what I can’t.”

That’s so different from how we usually live, isn’t it?

We think the path to peace is understanding everything inside us. Jesus seems to think the path to peace is bringing everything inside us to him. Even the parts we can’t parse. Even the feelings we don’t have language for yet.

Paul says it even more bluntly: “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes… with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8). Sighs.

Not eloquent prayers. Not spiritual speeches. Sighs. The Spirit doesn’t wait for you to become articulate. He meets you in the inarticulate.

So what if that sentence—“I cannot make anyone understand”—isn’t the end of the story?

What if it’s the doorway?

Because when you can’t explain yourself, you’re tempted to do one of two things:
  1. Hide. Keep it to yourself. Numb out. Smile and pretend.
  2. Hustle. Over-talk. Over-share. Over-analyze. Try to force clarity by sheer mental effort.
Neither one leads to freedom.

Jesus offers a third way: abide. Stay with him. Stay with what’s real. Let the fog be fog for a moment—and let love hold you there.

There’s a scene in the gospels where Jesus asks a question that always gets me: “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10). He doesn’t assume. He doesn’t rush. He invites desire into words.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is simply ask yourself, in God’s presence:
What am I actually feeling?
What am I afraid of?
What do I want—beneath what I want?

And you don’t have to answer quickly.

You can start with, “Jesus, I don’t know.”
Which is, oddly, a very mature prayer.

That’s it.

No fixing. No explaining. No making anyone understand.

Just presence.

“But isn’t this just introspection?”
That’s a fair objection. A lot of us are already stuck in our heads. The goal isn’t to obsess over yourself.

The difference is where you’re looking from.

Introspection says, “If I analyze enough, I can save myself.”
Apprenticeship says, “If I abide with Jesus, he’ll tell me the truth in love.”

One is self-salvation. The other is surrender.

And surrender doesn’t make you passive. It makes you honest. It makes you available to be led.

Because the point isn’t to become perfectly self-aware. The point is to become present—to God, to yourself, and eventually to others.

And over time, presence becomes language.

Not because you forced it. But because you stayed long enough for what’s inside you to come into the light.

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