I Took the Silence as a Reply

She was nineteen and she asked God one enormous thing, and she has never told anybody what it was.

She did it properly, in the way a nineteen year old does everything: completely, over about six weeks, with the seriousness of somebody who has not yet learned to hedge. She fasted a bit. She told God she would do whatever came back.

Nothing came back.

She is twenty seven now, and if you asked her she would say she is not angry about it and she would be telling the truth. It has been eight years and she has a good life and she has never made a thing of it.

Here is what she has never said out loud, and it is not about the request at all.

She did not conclude that the answer was no. She concluded something about herself.

She decided, at nineteen, in the way nineteen year olds decide permanent things in a fortnight, that she was not one of the people God talks to. Some people are and she is not. Not because of sin, she was not thinking in those terms. Just as a fact, like being short, or not being musical.

And she has been living as that person ever since. She prays. She goes. She would tell you her faith is real, and it is. She simply operates on the settled understanding that hearing is for other people, and she is one of the ones who reads about it.

The verse says the same thing twice for a reason

There is a line at the end of the twenty seventh psalm that repeats itself in a way that is not accidental.

Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.Psalm 27:14

Wait, I say, on the Lord. That is the sound of somebody saying a thing again to a person who did not take it the first time.

And notice the middle clause, because it is the one that matters for you. Be of good courage. Waiting is described there as requiring courage, which means the psalm assumes it is frightening, which means the writer knows exactly what happens to a person in a long silence.

Courage is not needed for things that are merely slow. It is needed for things that expose you. And what a long silence exposes is not the request. It is the question of whether you are the sort of person this happens to.

You are somebody God speaks to, and that was never determined by what did or did not come back at nineteen. That is what the word assumes about the one it tells to wait, not encouragement I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that plain to a woman at twenty seven.

A nineteen year old made a permanent ruling

Now the tender part, because there is no blame in this anywhere.

Look at who made that decision.

She was nineteen. She had asked one enormous thing with everything she had, in the most exposed way a person can ask, and nothing came back, and she was standing there holding it in front of her own life with no experience of anything and nobody to talk to about it.

And she did what any nineteen year old does with an unbearable ambiguity: she made it a fact about herself, because a fact about yourself is at least stable.

That was not stupid. It was a young person stabilizing something that had no shape. But she was nineteen, and it has been running your life for eight years, and it has never once been reviewed by the woman you are now.

And nothing about that silence was a statement about you. Scripture tells the one waiting to take courage rather than to draw conclusions, and the Holy Spirit is not confirming a ruling a teenager made in a fortnight.

Ask in the voice you have now

Here is the practical thing, and the detail matters.

Ask the old thing again, out loud, in the present tense, in the voice you've got now.

Not as the nineteen year old. She asked completely and she deserved better than she got, and she is not the one who has to do this. You're twenty seven, you know considerably more about how life goes, and you can ask a large thing now without staking your entire identity on the reply.

That is not a smaller faith. That is the same faith in somebody who has grown.

You are able to ask again without the answer deciding who you are, and that separation is not cynicism. He promised to strengthen the heart of the one who waits, and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a woman ask as herself rather than as a teenager.

And this article is not going to tell you why the six weeks were silent. Nobody honest will. It will only tell you that the silence was about the request and never about you.