Verily God Hath Heard Me

Six years, and the thing he has never been able to settle is not whether God said no.

It is whether the words got anywhere at all.

That is a different question and it is the one that actually sits on him. A no would be a transaction: something went, something came back, the account closed. What he has is six years of speaking into a room with no way of knowing whether there was anybody in it, and every conclusion available to him is a guess.

He is not a dramatic man. He has not stopped praying and he has not told anybody about this. He prays most days.

But there is a particular quality to how he prays now, and he noticed it about a year ago and could not un-notice it. He has started saying things in a way that assumes they will not be received. Slightly faster. Slightly more general. The way a man leaves a message on a number he suspects is out of service.

Here is what he has never said out loud.

He would settle for knowing it arrived. He is not asking to be told the outcome, he is not asking for the thing, and he would take a no now if a no came with proof of delivery.

He wants to know somebody was in the room.

The psalm reports the hearing as a separate fact

There is a line near the end of the sixty sixth psalm that most people read past because it does not sound like a claim.

But verily God hath heard me; he hath attended to the voice of my prayer.Psalm 66:19

Read what is being reported and, more importantly, what is not.

He does not say God gave him what he asked for. He does not describe an outcome anywhere in that verse. What he states, twice, in two clauses, is that the words were received.

Hath heard me. Hath attended to the voice of my prayer.

Attended is a word about somebody turning toward a thing and giving it their attention. It is a report about the far end of the line rather than about the result.

Which means the psalmist thought the hearing was worth stating on its own, as a fact in its own right, independent of what came of it. That is precisely the distinction you have been unable to make for six years.

You are heard, and the hearing is a fact of its own that does not wait on an outcome to become true. That is what the word actually reports, not a comfort I am inventing, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying that to a man who has been leaving messages on a number he thinks is dead.

The absence of evidence is not evidence

Now the honest part, and I am not going to soften it.

There is no proof. That is true and this article is not going to manufacture any.

But look at what you've done with that, because it is the thing that has actually changed how you pray. You've taken an absence of evidence and treated it as evidence of absence, which is a different claim and a much bigger one, and no honest person would let it past in any other area of your life.

Six years of nothing coming back is a fact about the return post. It is not a report about whether anything was received.

And I am not going to tell you why nothing came back. I do not know, and anybody who tells you they do is inventing something, and an invented reason would sit on you for the rest of your life.

And the silence has never once been a statement about whether you were heard. Scripture reports the hearing as its own event and never once ties it to an outcome, and the Holy Spirit is not standing outside a room a man has been speaking into.

Speak as though somebody is in the room

Here is the practical thing, and it is about how you say it rather than what you say.

Ask the old thing out loud, in the present tense, and say it the way you would say it to somebody who is actually there.

Slower than you've been saying it. Specific rather than general. The way you would speak to a man sitting across a table rather than the way you leave a message on a number you suspect is out of service.

That is not a technique for producing an answer. It is you refusing to let a six year guess set the manner of your speech.

You are speaking to Somebody who attends to the voice of a prayer, and the attending is stated in Scripture as a plain fact. He promised to hear, and the Holy Spirit is the One who gets a man to slow down and speak as though the room is occupied.