When our twin daughters were about twelve, they launched a campaign for a cell phone. And I mean a campaign. Laurie and Landra are smart. They made a poster and presented it to me in my office, laying out the case for why they needed a phone. Then they did a PowerPoint presentation. Then Laurie taped pictures of various cell phones around the house, so everywhere I turned, there was my daughters’ request, looking back at me.
I said no for a long time, because I had their best interests in mind. Then I said wait. And finally, one day, that glorious day, I said, “You can have a cell phone.” You’d have thought I’d handed them the keys to the kingdom.
Now think about what was happening during all those months of no and wait. Were they unheard? Not for a second. I heard every presentation. I saw every taped-up picture. I was never ignoring my girls. I was fathering them.
I want to say something as plainly as I can, because somebody reading this has quietly concluded that God ignores them: God answers every prayer. Every single one. But he answers the way a good father answers, with one of three words. Yes. Wait. Or no.
We love the yes. The yes gets the testimony at church. And I’ve made many requests to God where I did not receive what I asked for. If you’re honest, you’ll say the same thing. Nobody frames the waits and the nos, but every praying person collects them.
Wait is the answer we misread most. Wait feels exactly like silence. The poster is up, the PowerPoint has been delivered, and heaven appears to be doing nothing. But there is a canyon of difference between a father who isn’t listening and a father who isn’t finished. My girls interpreted my wait as cruelty. I knew things they didn’t: what a phone would cost them at twelve that it wouldn’t cost them later. Wait is not the absence of love. Wait is love reading a calendar you can’t see.
And no. We tell our dogs no. We tell our toddlers no. I don’t like the word no, and neither do you. But look at what John writes: this is the confidence we have, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. According to his will. Tucked inside the promise is the reality that some of what I ask is not according to his will, and when those requests meet a loving Father, the loving answer is no. A father who says yes to everything isn’t kind. He’s absent. Any parent who has watched a child beg for something harmful knows that the hardest, most loving word in the language has two letters.
When God says no, it’s out of love.
By the way, my girls got the phone. The request wasn’t wrong. The timing was mine to choose, because I was the father and I loved them.
So here’s the question this week will keep asking you: can you trust the Father when the answer isn’t yes? We’ll spend the next two days inside the wait and the no. But it starts here, with the settled fact that you have never once prayed into a void. He heard every word. He’s answering right now. It just may not be the word you wanted.