Waiting for God to Speak

“Listen to my prayer for mercy as I cry out to you for help, as I lift my hands toward your holy sanctuary.” (Psalm 28:2)

My husband crawls to my side of the bed and kneels on the floor beside me. It’s daybreak. Our daily prayer time. So I scoot out of the covers and fall to my knees beside him. Still in our pajamas, we lean in to each other, read our devotional, and Dan starts to pray, “O God!”

Does God hear us? We don’t even ask that question. After 40 years of marriage, we’re finally willing to learn a little something about patience. About waiting on the Lord. About God’s curious tendency to delay his replies.

So we’re not panicked today for quick answers. We’re humbled that God would even take time to listen to us. We were married 35 years before we started praying together like this. If God would wait that long for a distracted wife and husband to finally seek him together for their marriage, for family members, for life questions and more—then patiently reveal his answers—we have no doubt that God is good and God hears.

Call it amazing. Maybe that’s why David frames his plea in Psalm 28 by first acknowledging who God is: “my rock.” Not like the chalky caves near the Valley of Elah; God, in David’s eyes, is as enduring as the granite peaks of Sinai. He still is.

Like a silent rock, however, “Do not turn a deaf ear to me,” David begs God. “For if you are silent, I might as well give up and die” (verse 1).

Talk about a desperate prayer. But my husband and I can relate. Our youngest daughter has left the church and refuses to return—a situation that keeps us on our knees daily. If God were silent, we’d give up and die, indeed.

But God isn’t silent after all. He speaks in his Word, our Christ, and through his great promises, but also in his world. As I write this, the morning after a frosty weekend, I gaze out of my window to the audacious warmth of piercing sunshine.

Have hope, the beautiful day is saying. And in the sun’s glowing rays, I can hear the Divine. Kneeling with my husband today, letting him pray this time for both of us instead of jumping in to change his words, I gain humility and assurance.

As the late Dallas Willard wrote in Hearing God, “Learning how to hear God is to be sought only as a part of a certain kind of life, a life of loving fellowship with the King and his other subjects within the kingdom of the heavens.” It’s a journey, this business of hearing God. But what a trip! Let us not hurry our way through it.

Copyright © 2016 by the author and Today’s Christian Woman

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