How to Pray When You Hear Nothing from God

Small Voice
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You've been asking for a while now. Nothing has come back. Not a no, not a wait — nothing, and you can't tell which of those it is. You still believe. That's not the problem. The problem is what to say to someone who has gone quiet, when everything you can think of to say sounds like complaint or sounds like pretending. So you say less and less, and then you stop, and you didn't decide to. Nothing here promises the silence breaks. What's on offer is something to say while it holds.

Episodes

  1. Aug 13

    How to pray when you've been told to just wait

    Someone said it to you again this week. Wait on the Lord, his timing is perfect. They meant it kindly. It also ended the conversation — nobody says wait and then asks how it's going. And you can't say the real problem out loud: that you no longer know the difference between waiting on God and having quietly stopped. From the inside they look identical. Psalm 130 doesn't tell you to wait. It's a man doing it, out loud, from the depths, asking God to hear him because he isn't sure he's being heard. This episode reads the psalm whole, shows how the prayer is built — the watchman who cannot make the morning come, the waiting that is for a word rather than an outcome, a psalm that ends while it's still dark — and ends with one thing said out loud tonight.

  2. Aug 12

    How to pray when you've prayed the same thing every day

    You don't have to think about how to start it any more. Same request, same order, mostly the same phrases you landed on around the second week. Then you say amen and the room is the same room. Not just that nothing has changed — that nothing comes back. You speak into it and it stays exactly as it was before you spoke. David wrote Psalm 13 with his enemy on top of him, and the psalm never tells us the trouble lifted. He asks how long four times before he asks for anything, and the first two are about God, not the enemy: forget, and hide your face. This episode reads the psalm whole, shows how the prayer is built — the silence named first, the request small, the turn that happens with nothing resolved — and ends with one thing said out loud tonight.

  3. Aug 12

    How to pray when you cant tell if that was God

    Something got in. A thought arrived and it didn't arrive the way your own thinking arrives, and it hasn't left. You've been over it in the car, in the shower, at half past eleven with the phone face down. Some of those times you were sure. Some of those times you could see exactly how you built it yourself, and you can't get outside your own head far enough to check. David wrote Psalm 143 while he was being hunted, living in dark places, his spirit failing. He doesn't ask to be told whether he heard right. He asks to be caused to hear, and to be shown which way to walk. This episode reads the psalm whole, shows how the prayer is built — every verb God's work, the asking that doesn't wait until he's qualified, the morning he asks for and doesn't get inside the psalm — and ends with one thing said out loud tonight.

  • 3 Episodes

About

You've been asking for a while now. Nothing has come back. Not a no, not a wait — nothing, and you can't tell which of those it is. You still believe. That's not the problem. The problem is what to say to someone who has gone quiet, when everything you can think of to say sounds like complaint or sounds like pretending. So you say less and less, and then you stop, and you didn't decide to. Nothing here promises the silence breaks. What's on offer is something to say while it holds.

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