I Thought God Was In This

There was a Wednesday evening and you remember it clearly.

You had been asking for months. And that evening something settled and you knew, the way a person knows, and you told your husband on the way home in the car.

Three years later the numbers are what they are and the question has arrived.

Not the question about the numbers. The other one.

Did I hear anything at all.

That is where every prayer now stops. You start, and within about forty seconds you are back at the Wednesday, turning it over, and the whole thing becomes an inquiry rather than a prayer.

So you have mostly stopped. Not out of anger. Out of a kind of politeness, actually. It feels dishonest to talk to somebody while privately auditing the last thing they said.

And that has been the real loss of the last three years. Not the figures. The forty seconds.

Here is what makes it worse, and you have not said this out loud.

If you were wrong about the Wednesday, then you cannot trust the instrument. And if you cannot trust the instrument, then everything since is uncertain too, and that is a large thing to be carrying while running a building.

There is a proverb about this that is more merciful than it first looks.

Lean not unto thine own understanding

The proverb everybody knows has a second half that is doing the work.

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. (Proverbs 3:5, King James Version)

Lean not. That is a posture word, not a thinking word.

It does not say your understanding is worthless. It does not tell anybody to stop using their mind. It says do not put your weight on it.

You have been putting your whole weight on your own reading of a Wednesday, and Proverbs 3:5 says lean not rather than think not. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes the weight off a conclusion a person has been standing on, and He has been offering to since about the first year.

Now see what that does to the question.

The Wednesday has been treated as load bearing. If it was real, everything holds. If it was not, everything is uncertain.

That is leaning. That is putting the weight of a whole life onto one evening's interpretation, and the proverb says plainly not to do that with anything a person understands.

You are not required to make one Wednesday hold up three years, and it is written to lean not unto thine own understanding. The Spirit of God is the one who carries the weight instead, and Proverbs 3 is where the transfer is described.

And here is the part that will get the prayers moving again.

Nowhere does the proverb say the question has to be answered before the trusting begins. It says trust with all thine heart and do not lean. It says nothing about resolving what happened three years ago.

You have been waiting for a permission that was never withheld, and Scripture never once required a person to settle an old question before speaking to God. The Holy Spirit is the one who receives an unsettled person, and Proverbs 3:5 does not make clarity the entry fee.

The instrument is not the issue

Let me deal with the frightening part, because that is what has actually stopped the praying.

The fear is that the instrument is broken. That a mistake about the Wednesday puts the whole ability to hear anything in question, and therefore everything since then is unreliable.

Look at what that fear assumes. It assumes hearing is a mechanism that either works or does not, like a radio.

That is not how any of this has ever worked with anybody. Every person in Scripture who heard something also got things wrong, sometimes badly, sometimes about very large matters, and none of them was decommissioned for it.

You have been treating yourself as a piece of equipment that has failed inspection, and the written word never once handled a person that way. The Spirit of God is the one who works with people rather than with instruments, and Proverbs 3 addresses a heart rather than a mechanism.

And there is something else to say plainly, because it matters.

Nobody knows what that Wednesday was. Not you, and not anybody writing this. It may have been exactly what you thought. It may have been partly that. It may have been something else entirely, and the truth about it may not arrive for another decade.

What can be said is that a hard three years is not evidence either way. Plenty of things God is genuinely in are hard, and plenty of things that go well were never asked about.

You are holding a question that the outcome cannot answer, and Scripture puts the leaning rather than the knowing at the center of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who is honest with a person about what cannot be known, and Proverbs 3:5 does not pretend otherwise.

And one plain thing, because this is the heaviest row on this site. If three years of this has taken your nights somewhere dark, and thoughts about not being here have started arriving, that is not something to carry silently. Call or text 988, the crisis line, tonight, and tell one real person: a doctor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you. And for the numbers themselves, take them to somebody qualified to read them, because that is a different question from the Wednesday and it deserves a proper answer.

You have never been meant to be the only one who knows how heavy this has got, and the written word tells a heart to trust rather than to hold everything alone. The Spirit of God is the one who goes with a woman into that call, and Proverbs 3 never once asked her to settle anything first.

Pray without settling it

So here is the thing to do, and it happens tonight.

Pray out loud, and when the forty seconds come and the Wednesday arrives, say out loud: I am leaving that where it is. Then keep going.

Do not resolve it. Do not defend it. Do not apologize for it. Say that it is unsettled and that you are praying anyway.

You are praying as somebody with an open question rather than as somebody in dispute, and Proverbs 3:5 asks for the trusting rather than for the certainty. The Spirit of God is the one who receives it exactly like that, and He has been waiting three years to.

The reason it has to be out loud is that the audit runs silently. It is quick and it is habitual and it has been happening in under a minute for three years.

Said out loud, the question has to take its turn. It has to be spoken, which slows it down, and a spoken question is much easier to set on a shelf than a silent one.

You have been overtaken by something that only works in silence, and the written word gives a heart permission to trust while the understanding stays unresolved. The Holy Spirit is the one who holds a person through a prayer with a hole in it, and Proverbs 3 is where the leaning gets transferred.

Then go and open in the morning, and the building is exactly what it was, and you have prayed.