I Prayed About That House Specifically

You prayed for it by its street number.

That is what makes this different from the ordinary disappointment, and it is why you have not been able to explain to your wife what actually happened to you on Thursday.

You did not pray a careful prayer. You did not say, Lord, if it is Your will. You had done that for years about everything and somewhere in the spring you decided that the hedging had become a way of never asking for anything, so you said the number out loud. You said the street. You asked, plainly, like a man asking his father for a thing he wants.

And it went to somebody else.

And in the forty seconds after that phone call, before you had consciously thought anything at all, something in you filed the whole event, and the filing said: so that is the answer, then.

Not about the house. About you.

You have not said that sentence to anybody. You have not even really said it to yourself. But it has been sitting underneath everything for nine days, and it is the reason you have not prayed about anything since.

Two things that are not the same

Let me separate two things that arrived in the same forty seconds, because everything depends on holding them apart.

The first thing is that you asked God for a specific house and did not get it. That is a fact and it is not in dispute.

The second thing is a sentence your mind wrote about what that fact means, and the sentence was written instantly, without evidence, and it said something about your standing.

Those two are not the same, and nothing whatsoever connects them except the speed at which one followed the other.

You are holding a fact and a verdict as though they were one thing, and a prayer that went unanswered has never once been a report on the man who prayed it. It is written in Psalm 13 that a man may ask how long wilt thou forget me, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has sat with you through nine days of not praying.

And I want to say something about the courage of what you did in the spring, because it has gone unremarked.

You stopped hedging. You asked for a thing by name. That is what the hedging was protecting you from, and you knew it at the time, and you did it anyway. Most men never get there. They pray so carefully that nothing can ever be seen to fail, and they call the carefulness reverence.

You have taken a real risk in front of God, and naming what you wanted out loud has never once been presumption. Psalm 13 is a man speaking to God with no protective clause anywhere in it, and the Spirit of God kept that prayer in the book exactly as it was prayed.

The psalm that asks and does not get told

Here is the opening, and I want you to sit in it rather than hurry to the end of the psalm.

How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? (Psalm 13:1, King James Version)

How long wilt thou hide thy face.

That is a man in the middle of a silence, saying so, to God, in the second person. Not about God. To Him.

And here is what the psalm never does. It never gets an explanation. Read the whole of it. Six verses. He asks how long four times in two verses, he tells God what he is afraid of, he asks for an answer, and then at the end he says he will sing unto the Lord because He hath dealt bountifully with him.

And in between the asking and the singing there is no paragraph where God explains the silence. It is simply not there. The man goes from asking to trusting across a gap that the text does not fill in.

You are standing in a gap that scripture itself leaves unfilled, and not being told why has never once meant you were being told no about yourself. The written word records the question four times over and gives no answer to it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who preserved that silence honestly rather than inventing something to put in it.

That is the thing your mind did in those forty seconds. It found a gap and it filled it, instantly, with the worst available material, and then it presented the result to you as a finding.

But a gap is a gap. It is not a verdict. The psalm proves that a man can stand in one for a long while without the silence meaning anything at all about his standing.

You are standing where a psalmist stood, and four unanswered questions in a row have never once been the measure of a man's standing with God. Psalm 13 runs from the asking to the singing with nothing filled in between, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept it that way rather than tidying it.

You have been convicted by a silence that never said a word about you, and no unanswered prayer in scripture has ever once been treated as a judgment on the one praying. The Spirit of God is the one dismantling that finding right now, and Psalm 13 is where the question stands unanswered and the man is not condemned for asking it.