What do I do when God doesn't seem to answer?

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Accepted Answer

You've prayed. Not once — over and over, about the same thing, the thing that matters most. And the silence is starting to feel like an answer in itself: No. Or worse: nobody's there. Before you accept that conclusion, you should know that the Bible's own prayer book contains your exact words, prayed by a king: "How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?" — Psalm 13:1 (KJV) David — the man after God's own heart — prayed "how long" and got silence back, for a while. Kevin Allen, in a sermon he openly calls "Hate To Wait," confesses he is bad at waiting and names why it hurts so much: not knowing the reason for the delay, or whether the thing you long for will ever come. You're in biblical company, and you're in honest company. God's characteristic answer to "how long" is rarely a date. It is a posture: "Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord." — Psalm 27:14 (KJV) But waiting is not the same as doing nothing, and this is where the sermons press in. Taylor Little, preaching on asking, seeking, and knocking, points at Hebrews 11:6 — God "is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him" — and observes that faith has two halves: believing God is , and believing He rewards . His line: "most believers stop halfway across the bridge." Silence tempts you to turn around at the halfway point — still believing God exists, no longer believing He answers. The verse won't let the two halves separate. Dillon Morgan's lessons come from the barren — from Hannah, who prayed year after year for a child while her rival mocked her for it. What Morgan sees in her is a woman with something in her that said, "I'm not getting up until this is done." She kept praying at the same altar, in the same pain, and the answer, when it came, was Samuel. Morgan's other lesson is stranger and worth hearing: the barren are told to sing before there's anything to show for it — praise ahead of the answer, not after it. And one warning, from Allen's sermon, about the wrong exit: Abraham and Sarah, promised a son, decided after a decade that God must have forgotten, and ran what Allen calls God's red light — Hagar, Ishmael, and a fallout the world still lives with. Taking matters into your own hands always costs more than waiting would have. So what do you do? You keep the appointment you can't see the end of. You pray the next prayer. Isaiah's promise to people in your exact position is not that the wait will be short, but that it will not be wasted: "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." — Isaiah 40:31 (KJV) Simeon waited his whole life in the temple for one promise, and the day it came, his first word was "now." A lifetime of not yet turned in a moment. Your silence has an end date God can see. Keep seeking — the whole bridge, not half of it.