Nine Years And He Has Not Said Anything

She could tell you the thing she has been asking about, but that is not what she would want to talk about if you sat down out here.

The thing is the thing. It is real and it is heavy and she has carried it a long while and she has made her peace with the fact that some things sit where they sit. She is seventy one years old and she is not naive about how the world goes.

What she would want to say, if you gave her a while and did not rush her, is that in nine years of asking she has not once had the sense that God said anything back.

Not a no. She could work with a no. A no is a word and a word is a relationship. What she has had is quiet, and after a certain number of years a person starts doing arithmetic on quiet, and the arithmetic always comes out the same way and it is always about her.

She has prayed. Nobody would need to check. She prays the way some people breathe, in the garden, at the sink, with the radio on low. She has prayed the prayers with the good King James words in them because those are the words she was raised on, and she has prayed the plain ones, and there was a stretch a while back where she mostly just sighed at God and counted that.

And a neighbor she is fond of, over the fence, meaning it entirely kindly, said: have you ever tried fasting over it?

She said she would think on it. And she has, more than she would admit. And what she heard underneath a good woman's kindness was that after nine years there was still something she had not done, and that the quiet might, when you got right down to it, be her own fault.

If the quiet is your trouble more than the thing is, come and sit on the porch here a spell.

The complaint is already in the book

Here is the first thing, and it is not a comfort so much as a fact.

How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?Psalm 13:1

That is in the songbook. Not in a diary somebody found later. In the hymnal, with a tune, given to a whole congregation to sing out loud together on purpose.

God did not tidy that sentence up before He put it in. Nobody edited David into gratitude. The complaint stands there in the middle of Scripture with its arms folded, and it stands there because God is not embarrassed by the people who ask Him that.

You have not fallen out of favor by saying it, and you are not being punished with quiet for the asking. That is not a kindness I am extending to a woman on a porch. It is what the book itself demonstrates by keeping Psalm 13 exactly as it is, and it is the Holy Spirit who put that psalm within reach of the people who would need it most.

What the quiet is not

Now the harder half, and I will say it plainly because nobody out here is a child.

The quiet is not proof of anything about you. It is not a grade. It is not the withdrawal of a fond God who has finally had enough, and it is not a hint that you have been praying in some manner that does not qualify.

You are known and you are near to Him at seventy one exactly as you were at thirty. I am not saying that to fill a silence with something pleasant: the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and His Spirit has been carrying nine years of sighs at a kitchen sink into a country your words never had to reach on their own.

Same psalm. Look how it ends.

But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.Psalm 13:5

The complaint and that line are in the same short song. Nothing changed in David's circumstances between the first verse and the last, and nothing had to. He did not talk himself into cheerfulness. He put his weight down on mercy while the quiet was still going on.

So what is fasting, then, if it is not the thing that finally makes God speak?

The plain answer

Fasting is not a payment. It is not a lever, it is not the piece that has been missing, and it is not a message sent up to somebody who had not been told. It is the body brought into a prayer that was already going up. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and stands at a sink at seventy one, turned toward God with nothing in her hands.

You will not get a plan here. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to work up to and nothing to finish. A plan is how a thing like this turns back into a trade, and a trade is exactly what has been quietly wearing on you.

Now here is something I will say out loud rather than in fine print at the bottom. Some folks must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard road with eating, if you are frail or underweight or unwell, if you are older and unsure, or if you simply do not know, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let what they say be the answer. You are not one step further from God on account of a doctor's advice. The word says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to a woman because of what her body can do.

And if today has more in it than a page can hold, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not going around God. That is help He put in this world on purpose.