As a little girl, I would stand in socked feet on top of my dad’s shoes while he tried to teach me how to dance on the yellowed kitchen linoleum. “When it’s your wedding, you dance with your dad first,” he said sternly, “only when I let the groom cut in can he take you out of my arms.”
He couldn’t know then that he was the one who would be taken from my arms, not the other way around. While people earnestly prayed outside his hospital room for a miracle, I did not. Stage-four brain cancer was something I prayed to accept, not for God to heal.
When my dad took his last breath, I glanced down at my left hand resting near his knee. My engagement ring shimmered against the rough hospital blanket. It was ten weeks before my wedding day.
The Scars of Unanswered Prayers
No one told me about the scars that calcify around unanswered prayers, or how to grapple with disappointment in God that wheels uncontrollably toward anger. I was distracted enough navigating the countless losses that rippled outward from losing my dad, and at the same time propelled forward by the excitement of starting a brand-new life with my husband. And life kept going.
I didn’t stop believing in God, I couldn’t lose him too. We had been through too much together and I was sure he had his reasons. I kept reading my Bible, continued to lead in our church, and I still prayed. But my prayers became . . . small.
Navigating Disappointment and Trust in God
My imagination of God had slowly shifted to someone that I could trust for his vast knowledge and wisdom, but whose plan couldn’t be changed by my prayers. A God who refused to answer the smallest, purest request from his loyal servant, for a reason too vast for me to know.
Not being able to trust God to know and do good is the oldest lie in the Bible. It’s the fundamental lie that Satan told humans in the Garden of Eden, and it took me over a decade of unspoken prayers to realize I had begun believing it. My image of God had shifted toward wise and powerful, away from caring and kind.
Rediscovering God’s Character Through Prayer
The way we talk to God—or don’t—can reveal something hidden that we believe about who God is. An inescapable part of prayer is getting comfortable in the presence of God.
In Sunday school I was taught that God answered every prayer with one of three answers: yes, no, or wait. God always seemed to answer mine with silence, which was supposed to be a no or wait, and that never felt like much of an answer at all. I now know that God answers my prayers in an infinite number of ways. Sometimes he answers a prayer about my job with a word from someone else about my identity. Sometimes when I pray for my kids’ health, he answers with his own calming presence. There are more than three answers. They don’t fit on a traffic light. God has as many words and ways to meet us as a living, breathing, eternally wise, and boundlessly loving Father.
Moving Forward with Unanswered Prayers
I wonder what prayers we will bring to God in the coming weeks, or if those prayers will change, or how they will change us. All I can promise is that God is listening.
Adapted from Hear My Prayer by Liz Ditty. ©2024 by Liz Ditty. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Liz Ditty is a spiritual director, author, preacher, and teacher currently guiding transformative prayer retreats at Mount Hermon Conference Center, nestled in the coastal redwoods of California. A Silicon Valley native and Western Seminary graduate, Liz’s central purpose in all she writes and teaches is to gently draw attention to God’s presence in our actual—often challenging—lives. She is the author of Hear My Prayer.
