Six Years On The Same Stretch Of Road

There is a stretch of road between the grain elevator and the county line, eleven miles, and he has prayed on every one of them for six years.

Out loud. In the cab. Windows up in winter, down in summer, the same thing said to the windshield in a voice he would not use in a church building.

He started because it was the only quiet in the day. He kept on because a man does not stop asking for the thing he actually wants. And somewhere in year three he started noticing that he already knew, before he opened his mouth, exactly how the eleven miles would end. With him pulling onto the highway and nothing having happened.

He does not tell anybody this. In his church he is the one who prays for other folks, and prays well, and means it. But when the truck door shuts he is a man saying the same sentence into a windshield for six years running.

If you have got a stretch of road like that, ride along. I am not going to tell you what the quiet on it means. Every man who ever told me what mine meant was guessing, and most of them charged me nothing for it and it still cost me plenty.

I am not going to hand you a reason

Let us get this settled at the fence line, because a man braced for a lecture cannot hear a word of anything else.

I do not know why it has been quiet. Not one honest person does, and the ones who are certain about your six years have generally not sat through any of them.

I am not going to tell you there is something in your life blocking it. I am not going to say it is a season, or a lesson, or that He is building character, or that He is sparing you an answer you would regret, or that He has been speaking the whole time in a frequency you were too dull to catch. Those all do one job. They hand the silence back to a man as his own fault, wearing a coat that looks like wisdom.

You are not being kept out of anything. Six years of quiet is not God turning His back, and it has never once been a verdict on you. That is not my read on it. The written word says the LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth (Psalm 145:18), and truth in that sentence means honest and not polished, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a truck cab at ten past six in the morning.

The book keeps a man asking how long

Now here is the thing that steadied me on this, and it is not a trick for getting an answer faster.

How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?Psalm 13:1

That went in the book. Nobody sanded it down first. A man asked God twice in one verse how long, with an accusation sitting right in the middle of it, and the editors of the songbook looked at that and said, yes, that one, put it in, the people will need it.

Six years is not longer than that psalm allows for. There is no meter in Scripture that runs out and reclassifies you.

You have not prayed yourself out of bounds. What happens in that cab on those eleven miles is prayer, under the same name, in the same book, and the Word never graded it on the reply. That is written down and kept deliberately, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a man who has begun to suspect his own asking.

An unanswered prayer is not a returned letter

I want to take one picture off you, because I carried it for years and it is a lie.

The picture is a letter coming back marked no such address. That is what six years starts to feel like: the sense that the thing is going out and bouncing.

But a returned letter has a stamp on it that says nobody was there. You have no such stamp. What you have is quiet, and quiet is not a message, it is the absence of one, and a man can spend a decade reading his own conclusions into an envelope that was never sent back to him.

You are heard right now, on the road, in the words you actually use. The hearing is not the part that has been in question and it never was. The Word says that this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us (1 John 5:14), which settles the hearing and stays quiet about the timetable, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it up out of a cab where a man has stopped expecting anything.

And if these six years have taken more out of a man than he has let on, if sleep has gone, if the mornings have started to frighten, 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.