She stopped bringing it up about two years in. That is the detail that tells you everything.
Not because she stopped asking. She asks nearly every week. She stopped bringing it up to people, because of the look. You know the look. The one that starts sympathetic and then, very slightly, becomes advice. And the advice is always some version of the same thing: maybe He is saying no. Maybe He is saying wait. Maybe He is saying something you are not ready to hear.
Five years of that will teach a woman to keep her question in her own mouth.
The question is about her work. What it is exactly does not matter for our purposes, and she would tell you it does not matter to anybody but her, which is not true, but it is what five years of quiet teaches you to say about your own life.
And she has noticed the thing that happens to a question kept private for that long. It gets heavier and smaller at the same time. Heavier to carry and smaller to mention.
If you have a question you stopped mentioning, pull up a chair. I am not going to interpret your silence for you, and I am not about to hand you a maybe.
The maybes are not from Scripture
Let us clear the table first, because there is a stack of other people's guesses on it and nothing else will fit while they are there.
Maybe He is saying no. Maybe it is a wait. Maybe you would not be able to handle the answer. Notice that all three of those are somebody filling a silence with content, and then handing you the content as though it came from God, and then leaving you holding it.
I have nothing to add to that pile. I do not know why it has been quiet, and neither does anyone else, and the honest thing is to say so and stay in the room anyway.
You are not being ignored. Five years of quiet is not God declining to look your way, and it has never once been a ruling on your worth or your work. That is not my encouragement to give. The written word says that the eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry (Psalm 34:15), which describes a settled posture rather than an occasional glance, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that hold in a woman who has stopped telling anybody about the question.
The book keeps a man who said he got nothing back
Here is what steadied me on this, and it is not a way of decoding the quiet.
I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thou regardest me not.Job 30:20
That is in the Bible. A man says he cried and got nothing, and says it as a complaint directed at God Himself, and it was written down and preserved and read out in congregations for thousands of years.
Notice what God does with Job at the end of the book. He answers him out of the whirlwind, at length, and He never once rebukes him for that sentence. The rebuke in that book goes to the friends who explained the silence.
You have not asked wrongly. The Word keeps the complaint of a man who got nothing back, and it corrects the interpreters rather than the one who was waiting. That is written down and it is kept there deliberately, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a woman who has begun to think the problem is the question.
A private question is still a heard question
Something needs saying about what privacy has done to this, because that is the actual injury.
You went quiet about it socially, which was sensible, and then somewhere in there the question started to feel like a secret, and a secret starts to feel like something shameful, and now a perfectly ordinary request about your working life is being carried like a fault.
You are not carrying a shameful thing. What sits in your chest is a fair question asked by somebody He loves, and it has been fully heard every single week you have asked it. Scripture says the LORD looketh from heaven; he beholdeth all the sons of men (Psalm 33:13), and the beholding does not require an audience or a witness, and the Holy Spirit is the one that has carried five years of an unmentioned question without one of them going astray.
And if the five years have cost more than anyone around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, 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.
So here is where the whole thing turns, and it is not the answer, because I have not got one and I will not invent one for a woman who has waited this long.
God has not turned His face away from you, and He is near you in this quiet. That you have heard nothing in five years is not the same as nothing having been heard. The written word says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart (Psalm 34:18), and nigh is a word about distance and never about volume, and the Holy Spirit is the one who proves it true in your actual kitchen tonight rather than in general.
I cannot tell you what God says about your work, or when. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that not one week of the asking went unheard, and that the quiet was never the verdict everybody kept offering you.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of how patiently you have waited. The written word is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what keeps it living rather than merely persistent, and what God says about your work, and when, is His, in His own way and in His own time, and nothing on this page claims to know which.
- Five years of the same question, you are a length of asking and you are not God declining to look my way. Psalm 34 says the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and His ears are open to their cry, and the Holy Spirit makes that a settled posture instead of an occasional glance. In the name of Jesus I stop reading you as a ruling on my worth.
- Shame that has grown around a question I stopped mentioning, you are not God's word about me and you are not sitting at this table tonight. Psalm 33 says the Lord beholds all the sons of men, and the beholding never once needed a witness, and His Spirit carried five unmentioned years without losing one of them. I am asking it out loud tonight in the words I actually use.
- Father, You are nigh unto the broken hearted, and nigh is a word about distance and never about volume. I thank You that the complaint in Job 30 was kept in the book and that Your Spirit saw the correction go to the friends who explained the silence. Here is my question, out loud, and I am leaving the room without answering it myself.
Job 30:20
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