You are not answering my prayers, I repeated, a scowl in my voice that sounded more murderer than missionary.
My arms were about to give out after fifteen hours of flying with my double-ear-infection infant, whose screams drew every eye toward me, either in pity or loathing. My hands still reeked of my six-year-old’s vomit, which I had caught an hour earlier. My husband might have given me a break if he weren’t in the bathroom scrubbing his pants after our toddler’s diaper leaked brown everywhere. The stink polluted economy class, as if the sounds we contributed weren’t offensive enough.
It wasn’t our first rodeo traveling halfway around the world like beetles flipped on our backs. Our international travels form an ugly scrapbook of mishaps, with photos of feverish kids trying to sleep on airport carpet. I thought this time around would be different. How could it not be? Hundreds of people were praying. I imagined the golden bowls in heaven swirling with the incense of our friends’ and family’s prayers (Revelation 5:8). Surely, Jesus inhaled it with pleasure. The slightest wink or grin from my Father’s sunny face could keep our children at 98.6 degrees, their bodily fluids internal, and our plane punctual.
Where were those hundreds of prayers now? Had God misplaced them like a set of keys or muted them like an obnoxious ad? The Lord’s “no” stabbed like the throbbing inside my infant’s ears.
Praying While Weatherworn
This story isn’t special. Every one of us has extended a precious prayer and received what feels like a hailstorm in return. Or if not a hailstorm, maybe the cold silence of space. We are disturbed. What does this mean? How can we risk asking again, with its emotional toll? Are our longings safe with God? Can we receive the Lord’s “no” while reclining all the heavier against his chest, or should we question the safety of his embrace?
If only bad travel were the worst of it. Perhaps the Lord’s “no” grows fangs when your child stays sick, your marriage breaks, or cars collide. What happens when, after years of living desperately on your knees, the prodigal doesn’t return, mental illness gains momentum, or progress fighting besetting sin has little praise to report? We may ask, like Joni Eareckson Tada, “Who is this God I thought I knew? Who is this God who bids us crawl over broken glass just for the pleasure of his company?” (When God Weeps, 78).
Let’s zoom out and take a breath. Our disappointment with God can shrink our world. Without realizing it, we’re the horse with blinders, the scientist glued to his microscope, the painter shading in a nose’s shadow — so fixated on a part that we forget the whole. Just as we break from the office for a walk in the woods, we need the fresh air of a wider perspective.
Stepping back does not dismiss the painful mysteries of unanswered prayer and disappointment with God. When we look outside our experience, we are not forgetting or minimizing. We are saying, “I’m drowning, and I need a rock to hold onto. This one, gut-wrenching experience is sand I cannot stand on. Give me a place to put my feet.”
Thankfully, some thousands of years ago, King David turned the same cries into Psalm 69.
No Match for Majesty
He begins by saying, “Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold” (Psalm 69:1–2). Counselors advise paying special attention to the word-pictures people use to describe themselves. But it doesn’t take a professional to see that David’s drowning language means he’s not feeling too hot.
David is overwhelmed by sorrow. He’s brokenhearted, ashamed, and afflicted. He laments, “More in number than the hairs on my head are those who hate me without cause” (verse 4). Is there a friend to be found for David? Perhaps the loneliness would have been tolerable if the Lord had spoken up sooner. Instead, David admits, “I am weary with my crying out; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God” (verse 3).
But as we read on, we watch David leave the cubicle for somewhere greener. He rightly speaks his hurts and complaints — to a point. Honesty is God’s prescription for prayer, but if David stopped at his life-and-death feelings, it would make for little more than a juicy coffee date. The magic happens when he sets aside mystery for majesty.
The majesty of a God who plucks us from the sea of our circumstances by his “saving faithfulness” (verse 13). The majesty of a God whose love does not flicker like a tired lightbulb but shines steadfastly (verse 16). The majesty of his abundant mercy, heaped up and spilling over like plates at Thanksgiving dinner (verse 16). Majesty of such magnitude that his imprisoned people revive and sing (verse 32).
Majesty louder than man’s contempt (verse 12) and available to the sackcloth-clad (verse 11). Majesty that transforms lone-rider men and women into decisive followers, those who can say in seasons of hailstorm and silence, “But as for me, my prayer is to you, O Lord” (verse 13). David is like the mountain climber motivated by the view from the top, only the panorama David is after holds the majesty of Zion (verse 35).
If majesty is heavyweight our world, we will make songs in the muck like David (verse 30). We will learn to give thanks while friendless and think of the precious reality ahead more than the presently disappointing one (verse 35). When our circumstances scream, “God is absent,” our prayers will reflect the confidence that “the Lord hears the needy” (verse 33).
Jesus Sang It Better
David prays this way, but so does Jesus. David may have felt like his old friends were now offering him poison for food and sour wine for drink (Psalm 69:21), but Jesus literally put his lips to a sour sponge on the cross (Matthew 27:34). Matthew Henry connects Christ to Psalm 69: “His throat is dried, but his heart is not; his eyes fail, but his faith does not. Thus our Lord Jesus, on the cross, cried out, Why hast thou forsaken me? Yet, at the same time, he kept hold of his relation to him: my God, my God.”
David sings Psalm 69 well, but Jesus sings it better. For Christ’s words rang out even as the world went black, with hell’s fury before him and a rag stuffed down his throat. David felt underwater, but Jesus suffocated and drowned. While we are continually with the Lord (Psalm 73:23), Jesus was the Lamb left to the wolves. If Jesus trusted God there, can we not trust him here?
Here — in the majesty of a love that, as the old hymn says, is “vast, unmeasured, boundless, free, rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me” (“O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus”). Those who swim in that ocean endure hailstorms and silence without turning to stone. They may wince at their ugly travel scrapbook, but they count on a last page that glitters. Their hearts are soft, their prayers frequent, their requests risky. Instead of withdrawing at the Lord’s “no,” they pray all the more, knowing George Herbert to be right when he calls prayer the “soul’s blood” and the “church’s banquet.”
When the mysteries of life are rightly ordered by the majesty of God, we sing like Jesus, David, and all the saints resting in “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).
