Thirty Years Of Asking And Nothing Yet

Thirty years is not a figure of speech. She started the autumn her youngest went to school and that girl is thirty six now with children of her own.

She has asked for it in that building most weeks of those thirty years. Not dramatically. She is not a dramatic woman. She sits where she sits and she asks, in ordinary words, for God to do again in that place what she believes He is willing to do.

Nothing has come. Not nothing at all, because she would not say that and it would not be true. Nothing of the kind she has been asking for.

She is not bitter. She has checked, more than once, in the honest way an old woman checks a thing, and there is no bitterness in it. She is fond of that congregation and she is not disappointed in God.

What she cannot settle is what to call herself. Thirty years of asking with no visible movement is either a woman of great faith or a woman who has not noticed that the answer was no a long time ago, and from the inside those two feel exactly the same, and she has no way of telling which one she is.

If you have been asking a long time, come and sit on the boards. Nothing about that building is going to be criticized here.

The waiting is commended in its own right

Let us look at the choice she thinks she is facing, because it is presented to her as two options and there is a third.

Option one: this is faith, and she should continue. Option two: this is stubbornness, and she should stop and make her peace. She has been trying for years to establish which, in order to know what to do, and she cannot establish it, so she continues without approving of herself.

The third option is the one the book actually offers: that the waiting itself is the thing being commended, and that it does not require her to first certify her own motive in order to be good.

You are not required to name it before you continue. Nothing about being unable to tell faith from stubbornness has ever made thirty years of asking worthless. I am not saying it to keep an old woman going. Scripture says it is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD (Lamentations 3:26), which calls the waiting itself good, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a woman on a porch in the evening.

The waiting is called good, not the outcome

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off that congregation.

Read the object of the word good, because it is not attached where a person expects.

It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.Lamentations 3:26

It is good that a man should wait. The goodness is attached to the waiting, in the present, as an activity, and not to the eventual arrival of the thing waited for.

And quietly wait. That is exactly what she has done. Not agitating, not making a scene about it, not requiring the room to join in. The verse describes her behavior with some precision and then puts the word good in front of it.

Your waiting is called good in its own right, and Scripture attaches the word to the waiting rather than to the outcome. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman thirty years in.

Nothing here is against that congregation

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page about a church that would not join her.

They have not obstructed her. Most of them do not know she does it, because she has never once made it a campaign, and a congregation that has gone on being ordinary and faithful for thirty years is not a congregation that failed.

And nothing here says she is more faithful than they are, or that she should be somewhere else. She has been in that seat for thirty years and there is not a sentence on this page suggesting she should look for another one.

You are asking for this again, here. The fire that stayed is the one you want, not the one you remember. Scripture says how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him (Luke 11:13), where the asking is named and no interval is attached to the answering, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not thirty years of silence, who decides what a woman receives.

And if this has cost more than the neighbors on that porch know, if sleep has gone, if the question has started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.