I Asked For One Thing

He has asked God for a great many things in his life and he is not counting most of them.

He knows how it works. He is not a man who thinks prayer is a slot machine and he would tell you, unprompted, that he has had more than he deserves and that he has watched God do things for his family that he cannot account for.

But there was one.

He does not want to describe it in detail here and he does not have to. You have your own. His involved a person he loves and a stretch of about fourteen months, and during those fourteen months he prayed with a seriousness he had never brought to anything, and he means that literally: he changed how he lived in order to pray about it properly.

And it did not happen.

Not delayed. Not answered differently in a way that turned out better. The thing he asked God not to let happen, happened, and he was standing there when it did.

That was three years ago.

He has not become bitter, and he has not stopped, and he would be embarrassed by anybody describing him as in crisis. He still prays. He prays for other people, out loud, in front of others, and he means it.

But here is what he has quietly held since that afternoon.

He believes something was withdrawn.

He does not think he is being punished. He is not looking for a fault in himself. He thinks the closeness he had was a thing God chose to give and then chose to stop giving, and that the fourteen months were the last of it, and that the silence around that one prayer was not a silence about the prayer. He read it as a silence about him.

And that is you with your own fourteen months, or you would not still be reading.

Jesus promised the staying separately

Here is a sentence Jesus said the night before He died, to men who were about to watch Him not be rescued.

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever.John 14:16

Forever.

That word is doing something specific and I want you to see it. He is not promising them outcomes. He is about to be arrested and executed in front of them and He knows it and He does not tell them it will be prevented. What He gives them instead, in that room, hours before the worst thing they ever saw, is a guarantee about the Presence and its duration.

He separated the two Himself. The staying is not a report card on the outcomes. He handed one of them over as certain on the very night the other one went the way you have watched yours go.

You have been given a Helper to be with you forever, promised on a night when the worst thing was not prevented. It is written that He will give you another Helper, to be with you forever (John 14:16). The Holy Spirit was with a man standing in that room three years ago while the thing he had prayed against happened in front of him.

Now the inference, and I am going to be careful with it, because you are not a man who will accept a soft answer.

You reasoned: the closeness came, I asked for one thing, the thing was refused, therefore the closeness was withdrawn. But that only follows if the closeness was the same currency as the answer, and Jesus put them in separate hands on purpose. He gave the disciples nothing at all about the outcome of that week. He gave them everything about the company.

The silence was about the prayer. It says nothing about you, and it was never about His location.

You are not being read out of the room by an outcome, and the silence was never a verdict about your standing. It is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26), which puts Him inside the praying rather than outside it, weighing. The Holy Spirit was in the fourteen months with you, and He did not leave in the third one or the last one.

And now the plain thing, and there is nothing after it.

He is here. Three years on, in the same room, with the same closeness He gave you before, and none of it was rescinded on that afternoon.

You are not cast off, and no unanswered prayer has ever had the power to do that. It is written that He has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never does not depend on what He does or does not prevent. The Holy Spirit has been with you every one of the three years you have believed something was withdrawn.