Eleven Years of Five in the Morning

The chair is a green armchair in the front room, and Loretta has knelt at it at five in the morning since the spring of 2014.

Not most mornings. Every morning. Through two jobs, one surgery, her mother's last year, a move, and a winter where the heat was out and she knelt in a coat. She sets the alarm for four fifty. She does not use a light. She has a shape to it: thanksgiving, then the church, then her children, then her grandchildren by name, and then the thing.

The thing is her son. That is all this article needs to say about it, and it is not going to say any more, because it is not the point and because I do not know yours.

Eleven years. It has not moved.

Loretta is sixty-six and she is not a fragile woman and she does not complain. If you sat with her she would tell you about the ones that did move: the house in 2016, her sister's health, the young man from the church who is a father now. She keeps a real account and she is honest about both columns.

But there is a thing that has grown in her over eleven years and she has never said it out loud, not once, not to her pastor and not to the woman she has prayed with on Thursdays since 2009. It is this: she has started to think the silence is the answer. Not that God cannot. That He has answered, and the answer is no, and the eleven years are Him being kind enough not to say it in words.

She has never put it like that even in her own head. It just sits there under the mornings.

Here is the day it caught.

A young woman at the church, twenty-four, brand new, asked Loretta to teach her how to pray. And Loretta, who has done this a hundred times, started saying the things she says, and then the young woman asked, "What if you pray about something for a really long time and nothing happens?"

And Loretta opened her mouth and there was a pause. A real one. Long enough that the young woman noticed.

And Loretta said, "Then you keep going," which is true, and which was not the answer to the question, and both of them knew it.

You have a silence like that. A stretch so long that it has stopped being a wait and started, quietly, without your permission, to look like a reply.

From the first day

Let me set down what I am not doing here, because I can feel the bracing.

I am not going to tell you what is going to happen with the thing that has been prayed about for eleven years. I do not know. I am not going to tell you it is coming, and I am not going to tell you the answer is no either, because that is not mine to say and it is not yours to conclude. I am not going to hand you a reason for the eleven years. I do not have one.

What I will do is take you into Daniel 10, which is the only place in the Bible that pulls back the curtain on a silence and shows you what was in it.

Daniel has been mourning and praying for three full weeks. Twenty-one days. No answer, nothing, not a word. And then a messenger arrives, and the first thing he says is this:

Fear not, Daniel: for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words.Daniel 10:12

Read that again slowly, because there are two enormous things in it.

The first: from the first day. Not from the twenty-first. Not when God finally relented. The words were heard on day one, and day two, and every day of the silence, and Daniel had no way of knowing that from where he was standing.

You were heard on the first morning, and every silent morning since has been a morning of being heard rather than a morning of being refused. Daniel 10:12 says the words were heard from the first day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a front room at five in the morning.

The second thing: I am come for thy words. The messenger says the delay had nothing whatsoever to do with whether Daniel had been received. Something else entirely was going on, and Daniel is not asked to understand it, and frankly the text does not explain it in a way that would satisfy anybody.

You have never once been given the assignment of interpreting the silence, and Daniel 10 exists precisely because a man could not have interpreted his. It is written that his words were heard from the first day of a silence he could not read, and the Holy Spirit is what takes the job of interpretation out of a person's hands.

Silence is not a sentence

Now let me be careful here, because this could easily be turned into something cruel.

I am not saying your eleven years have a Daniel 10 explanation. I do not know what is in your silence. Nobody does. I am not going to build you a picture of what has been happening behind the curtain, because the moment I do that I am making things up about God, and there has been enough of that already from people who meant well.

What Daniel 10 establishes is not an explanation. It is narrower and better than that. It establishes that a long silence is not, by itself, evidence of anything about whether you were heard.

You are not holding a message, and the only place in Scripture that shows us inside a silence shows a man being heard the entire time. Daniel 10:12 is that place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person from reading a delay as a verdict.

And I want to name the specific thing that grows in a long silence, because naming it takes most of its power. It says: God has answered kindly by not answering. It never announces itself. It arrives dressed as maturity, as being realistic, as not presuming.

It is not maturity. It is a conclusion drawn from an absence of data, and it is the one conclusion the text will not let you draw.

You have not been let down gently, and Scripture does not once use silence as a form of communication anywhere in either testament. Daniel 10:12 has the messenger correcting exactly that reading, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient correction land on eleven years of mornings.

And say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If eleven years of this has taken you somewhere darker than tired, or if what sits under those mornings has gone somewhere you have never said out loud, do not carry that on your own. Tell somebody today. Your Thursday friend, your pastor, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about your son. That is me refusing to leave you kneeling at that chair by yourself.