Be still, and know that I am God Psalm 46:10 NIV

I’m noticing a pattern among women, myself included. Often, we find ourselves in a desperate situation or worried about someone we love.  Well-trained as believers, we start praying for God to rescue us or the other person.

We faithfully keep praying and nothing happens.  Then we start questioning God: ‘What’s up with this?  Why are you not answering my desperate prayers? What I’m praying for is a good thing.  It’s not for money or fame or anything ‘selfish’ like that.  I’m asking you to do what the Bible records as your own desires, Father!’

I first experienced God’s silence, his apparent unwillingness to answer ‘a spiritual need’, when I was about 30. Living in England we worshipped at a local Anglican church. As we got to know people, we were invited to participate in a weekly house group.

I felt hungry to go deep into God’s word and to draw closer to him.  I can’t recall what caused me to think that Mike was less ‘spiritual’, but I vividly remember frequently tugging on God’s sleeve, so to speak, begging him to grow my husband’s faith.  Nothing changed.  I even started privately lamenting my unanswered prayers about him with a couple of mature women at church. 

Here’s the catch.  My tone when I would share why I was praying, sprang from a boastful position.  Picture in your head: ‘I’m so spiritual.  I just wish my husband would catch up with me!’

I know.  It’s awful.  I’m ashamed to pull back the curtain and give you a peak into my heart.  But it’s the truth.

It was a good 12 or 13 years before the Lord changed Mike.

Only in looking back do I see how my good Father first chose to straighten me out. I oozed spiritual pride. My heart was ugly.

Here’s my conclusion.  We can’t see or know all the details in our lives or those of others.  Only God does.  He is God and his point of view is from above.  You and I live horizontally; hence our information is limited.

A promise from Psalm 84:11 has helped me adjust my assessment of God and his slow or strange ways of answering our requests.  In this psalm he pledges that he will withhold NO good thing.

If that’s the case, then we are wrong to write off those events as ‘this should not have happened!’  What we deem as bad, horrible, painful, devastating, unfair, exhausting could actually be circumstances he deems good. These are circumstances that he has ‘planned to permit’, as John Piper notes. They are all for good purposes, plans that only the unique all-wise loving God of the universe knows.

Thinking about a friend whose husband seems to have walked away from believing God, I jotted down in my journal what she might respond to me about Psalm 84:11,

  • ‘But this is a good thing I’m asking God for!’
  • I reflected back to her on paper, ‘But maybe there is a better thing God wants for you or your husband!’

God says in Psalm 46:10 (with my paraphrase):  Stop fretting and worrying.  I am God.  I have the highest vista over this situation.  I know what I am doing.

The Bible teaches that God is providential, that he controls every subatomic particle in the universe and directs each one in a way that does not violate our free will nor inculpate him in sin. That being the case, then we must reason outward, starting from his word, not from our perspective.

My conclusion about answered prayer, based on anecdotal accounts and my life is that often we prideful women need a lot more holiness training than our men.  Our good Father loves us SO much that he will stop at nothing, even delaying ‘fixing our husbands’, to get us right.  When we’ve been ‘pruned, cut and cauterized’, only THEN does he turn his purifying gaze on our guys.

Don’t you want to get on with ‘it’ then? I know I do!

May we turn our attention (not our prayers) away from how much someone else needs to change and focus on becoming more holy, like Jesus. We can trust the Master.