He Could Not Bear to Ask Again

Tom is a practical man and this is a practical story about a thing that is not practical at all.

He and Claire have wanted a house of their own since 2016. Not a large one. They are not dreamers. They have saved, twice, and both times the savings went: once on her father's care and once when the transmission and the roof happened in the same March. They rent a place they like well enough on a street they like fine, and they are forty and forty-two, and this is not a tragedy and Tom would be the first person to tell you it is not a tragedy.

He used to pray about it. Specifically. In a notebook, even, for a while, which is not like him.

He stopped in 2021 and he can tell you the week.

It was not a crisis of faith. Tom would find that phrase embarrassing. What happened was that they went to see a house they could nearly afford, and Claire stood in the kitchen and did a thing with her hands, this little unconscious thing, measuring where a table would go. And they did not get it. And on the drive home Tom realized that the worst part of the whole thing was not losing the house. The worst part was that he had let himself picture it, and had prayed about it out loud that morning, and had therefore been holding it slightly, and the letting go cost something specific.

So he stopped. Not the faith. The asking. He decided, in a way he never said out loud, that he would rather be a man who does not want a house than a man who wants one and does not have it.

Four years. He has not mentioned it to God once.

Here is the evening it caught.

His nephew, twenty-three, newly married, bought a place. Small, needs work, but theirs. And at the cookout the boy came over with two plates and said, "Uncle Tom, when you and Aunt Claire buy, what kind of yard do you want?"

Not if. When. A kid's question, asked with total confidence, by somebody who has not yet learned that people stop asking for things.

And Tom said, "Oh, we're not really looking."

And the boy said, "But if you were."

And Tom sat there with a paper plate on his knee and found that he could still, instantly, four years later, see exactly what Claire did with her hands in that kitchen.

You have a thing like that. Not abandoned in unbelief. Retired for safety. Something you stopped asking for because the asking had a cost and you were, sensibly, trying to stop paying it.

The flattest sentence in the psalms

Let me put down what I am not doing here, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you a house is coming. I do not know. I am not going to tell you God has something better, because that sentence has been used to close down more honest disappointment than almost any other, and I am not going to use it on you. I am not going to explain the nine years.

What I will do is read you one verse near the end of Psalm 66, and I want you to notice how unadorned it is.

But verily God hath heard me; he hath attended to the voice of my prayer.Psalm 66:19

Verily is old English for truly, or, in the way we would actually say it, he really did. It has the tone of a man settling an argument. Somebody, somewhere, has been saying otherwise, or the man himself has been thinking otherwise, and this verse is the flat correction.

And notice: it is not a hopeful sentence. It is not God will hear. It is not I believe God hears. It is a statement of completed fact, in the past tense, made by a man whose psalm two verses earlier still has him crying out.

You have been heard, as a finished fact, and the finishing did not wait for the circumstances to resolve. Psalm 66:19 states the hearing in the past tense in the middle of unfinished trouble, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and onto a folding chair at a cookout.

Look also at the second half. He hath attended to the voice of my prayer. Attended. That is a word about somebody giving you their whole attention, the way a person turns their body toward you.

You were given the whole attention of God on the mornings you have decided did not count, and that attention is described as a completed act rather than a possibility. It is written that He attended to the voice of the prayer, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient attentiveness a present fact.

Not doubt. Something else.

Now here is the part I want to be careful with, because most preaching would aim at the wrong target and hit a decent man in the chest.

Tom does not have a faith problem. If you asked him whether God hears prayer he would say yes without hesitating, and he would mean it, and he would be right. What Tom has is a self-protection problem, which is a completely different thing, and which almost nobody preaches about because it does not sound spiritual enough to bother with.

He stopped asking because asking made him hold something loosely, and holding something loosely and then losing it hurts in a way that not wanting it at all does not. That is not unbelief. That is a man doing basic arithmetic about pain.

You are not standing in front of God as somebody who failed to believe, and Scripture does not use that category for what you actually did. Psalm 66 was written by somebody who names both the crying out and the hearing without shame about either, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an honest self-protection from being renamed as sin.

But here is the cost of the arrangement, and it is worth seeing plainly. Not asking does not actually protect you. Tom could still see Claire's hands four years later, instantly, at a cookout, from a question asked by a twenty-three-year-old. The wanting did not go anywhere. All that went was the saying.

You have not lost the wanting by refusing to say it, and Scripture is remarkably relaxed about people bringing God things they have wanted for decades. Hannah in 1 Samuel 1 brought the same thing year after year in the same place, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that a pattern rather than an embarrassment.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If nine years of this has gone somewhere heavier than disappointment for you, or if the not-wanting has spread into places it should not have, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody tonight. Your wife, a friend, 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 a house. That is me not leaving you on that folding chair by yourself.