When the Thing You Prayed For Still Doesn't Happen

Most of us learn to pray in generalities, and there's a reason generalities feel safer. A prayer for God's will to be done can't be disproven by Thursday afternoon. Asking for peace, wisdom, or open doors leaves enough room that almost any outcome can be read afterward as an answer. Then something lands in your life that matters too much for careful language, and you find yourself praying for the specific thing.

That happened to me repeatedly during the stretch of unemployment behind most of what I've written lately. My prayers stopped being about doors in general and became about a particular role at a particular company, with a start date that would've arrived before a particular bill. There were dates in those prayers and there were numbers in them. Anyone who tells you specific prayer is presumptuous has probably never been close enough to the end of a month to need one.

The answer was no. The message came the way those messages usually come, politely and quickly, and the role went to somebody else. I've had that happen more than once, and there's a strange interval afterward where you're not yet sad, only calculating, watching the arithmetic of the next ninety days rearrange itself in your head.

What happens after that interval is the actual subject here, because most of us reach for one of two responses and both of them cost something.

The first is to spiritualize the disappointment before we've felt it. We say that God closed the door, that it clearly wasn't meant to be, that He must have something better lined up. Any of those sentences may turn out to be true. Delivered too quickly, though, they work as anesthetic rather than theology, and you've skipped the part where you admit that something you wanted has been taken off the table. Grief that gets refused doesn't leave the building. It waits in a back room and comes out later attached to something small, usually aimed at a person who didn't earn it.

The other response is to read the no as a verdict on God Himself. Maybe He didn't hear, or heard and declined to care, or answers for other people in ways He doesn't answer for you. That conclusion is understandable and it's also enormous, built from a single data point in a life you can only see a few feet of.

Scripture turns out to be remarkably unbothered by unanswered prayer, which surprised me the first time I went looking for it honestly. Paul asked three times for the thorn to be removed and received a no with an explanation attached, though the explanation removed nothing. He kept the thorn and got a sentence about grace instead of relief.

The harder example sits in the garden. Jesus asked the Father to let the cup pass, asked with enough intensity that Luke records the physical effect on His body, and asked more than once. The request wasn't granted. Whatever we believe about prayer has to be held alongside the fact that the most righteous prayer ever prayed received a no, and the one praying it walked to the cross anyway.

Then there's David, who fasted and pleaded for a week while his infant son was dying. When the child died, he got up, washed, ate a meal, and went in to worship. His servants found the sequence backwards. His explanation was that while the child was alive there was reason to ask, and now that the answer had arrived, he'd carry it. He did his grieving during the asking, not after the verdict, which is nearly the opposite of how most of us operate.

All of that brings me to the distinction I think matters most. Trusting God and pretending you're not hurt are two different activities that look almost identical from the outside. Trust is a conclusion you've reached about who God is. Pretending is a decision about who you'd prefer to appear to be. One of them survives being told the truth, and the other one requires that the truth never get spoken in the first place.

Here's the test I use on myself. If you can tell God that you wanted the job, that the money frightens you, that the no makes no sense to you when the request seemed so reasonable, and then say afterward that you're still not leaving, you've trusted Him. If you have to skip the first half in order to reach the second, you've performed it instead. The performance holds up beautifully in a church lobby and falls apart completely at two in the morning.

I still pray specifically. Several no’s in a row haven't talked me out of it, partly because vague prayer protects me from disappointment by never asking for anything God could visibly decline, and that protection isn't worth what it costs. The particular prayer I mentioned at the start hasn't been answered in the way I asked. I don't know that it will be. What I'd rather be is a man who asked plainly and got told no than a man who kept every request blurry enough that he never had to find out.