Dear friend,
Maybe you still pray about it. You just don’t let yourself picture it anymore.
You used to let your mind wander into the life you were asking for. You could imagine the conversation when the news finally came. What you would say. Who you would call first. Now you catch yourself getting too far ahead and pull back. You tell yourself you’ll see what happens.
And you mean it. You would like to see what happens without building another future in your mind that you might have to grieve.
I understand that more than I wish I did.
I know what it is to believe God and be afraid to hope with the same openness I once had. To still want something deeply and try not to think about it too much. There are parts of my heart I have boarded up because I remember what it cost to leave them open.
I’m writing to you from there.
You may be waiting for something to change. Or you may be learning how to live with something that cannot be undone. Some days, what you hope for is simply to get through an ordinary day with a little less pain.
People can look at your life and see reasons to be grateful. You may be grateful for every one of them. Then a date comes around on the calendar, and you remember what you thought would be different by now. The ache is there again.
Sometimes the gratitude makes it harder to admit the ache. You start listing what you have as though you need to talk yourself out of wanting what you don’t. Somebody else has it worse. Look how far you’ve come. Look how much God has already done.
All of that may be true. So is the thing that hurts.
I don’t want my gratitude to become a way of keeping God away from my grief. We can tell Him we’re grateful and still tell Him what we’re waiting for. The unanswered prayer doesn’t cancel the gifts. The gifts don’t make the unanswered prayer stop mattering.
What makes waiting so difficult is how much of life continues while you’re doing it. There are messages to answer and people who need something from you. You may be doing what the day requires and still have no idea what to do with yourself when the house gets quiet. Other people may see you functioning without knowing how much effort it takes.
And after enough time, another question can begin to surface: Does God still see me here?
It can be especially hard when you did pray. When you did trust Him. When you weren’t standing at a distance, waiting to be persuaded. You brought your whole heart to it, and something still broke. Now even an encouraging word can make you cautious. You know how quickly encouragement can become a picture of the future, and how much it hurts to lose that picture.
I don’t want to rush you past that. I don’t think the way back to hope begins with pretending you have forgotten what happened.
I wish I could write you a date. I wish I could tell you that by the time you read this again, the thing keeping you awake will have resolved itself. I can’t. I’ve felt too much of the distance between what I hoped would happen and what happened to offer you certainty I don’t have.
I still believe He is with us. And I know how hard that can be to hold on to when nothing seems to change.
There is something in Romans 8 that gives me room to breathe. Paul writes about people who belong to God and still groan while they wait. Then, in verse 26, he includes himself among those who don’t know what to pray. God’s Spirit helps us in that weakness, interceding for us when we don’t know what to ask.
Paul doesn’t describe uncertainty from a safe distance. He puts himself among the people who need help.
I can recognize myself there. I can know exactly where it hurts and have no idea what to ask God to do with it. I can be tired of saying the same thing and afraid of what it would mean to stop asking. The help Paul describes meets us while we are still like that.
You may be angry. You may want to ask why He let you get your hopes up. I can’t resolve that question for you. But I don’t believe you have to resolve it before you bring it to Him. He already knows what you are trying to find the courage to say.
So perhaps the prayer available to you today is the one you’ve been editing out.
“God, I’m afraid to want this again.”
Even that may feel like more than you can say today. The help Paul describes does not begin only after we have found the words.
If someone safe comes to mind, you might let them hear a little more of the truth. If you’ve been answering “I’m fine” because you don’t have the energy to explain everything, you could begin with something smaller than the whole story: “I’m having a hard time. Can you stay on the phone with me?”
You don’t have to make the conversation uplifting. You don’t have to arrive at a lesson before another person is allowed to sit with you. Some days, letting yourself be cared for takes the little courage you have left.
And if you’ve been reading this thinking, “I don’t have that person,” I don’t want to skip over you. You may have tried to tell someone before and found yourself having to explain why you still hurt. Finding someone you can trust can feel like one more thing you don’t have the strength to do.
I still want relief. I still believe God can change things. I want to look forward to tomorrow without immediately preparing myself for what might go wrong. I want that for you, too.
Tomorrow may still be hard.
I am still waiting for things I cannot make happen. Some parts of my heart are still boarded up. I believe God is with me here, too.
Dex