Did God Just Ignore You?
Years ago, I was summoned out of a board meeting for an emergency phone call. Before the age of cell phones, a hospital in Santa Monica had called my wife with urgent news that my dad had been admitted.
He had had a severe heart attack a couple of weeks earlier, had partially recovered, and had been sent home. I was scheduled to fly out the next day for a visit. But early that morning he had had another attack, and this time it looked as if he might not survive longer than a few hours.
I hopped on a plane in Chicago and headed for L.A. I hoped Dad would survive until I got there. We had talked on the phone since his heart attack, but I wanted to see him. I wanted to tell him one last time that I loved him. I felt there was still some resolving to be done, especially in light of tension we experienced in our relationship years earlier.
And there had been no chance for him to tell me about the arrangements he had made for Mom, who was hopeless with anything related to finances. It seemed like such a simple thing.
“Please, Lord,” I wrote in my journal not long before my plane landed, “keep Dad alive until I come.”
So logical. So easy for God.
I was greeted at the airport terminal by my mom and a friend of the family. It took but an instant to read their faces and hear what I had dreaded: Dad had died even as I was winging my way there.
What of my earnest pleading? What do we do when a request seems to go spectacularly unanswered? It can feel that way, can’t it? Haven’t we all lobbed prayers God’s way and been disappointed?
During the Zoom class on prayer I recently led, we were talking about unanswered prayers, and one of the participants confessed, “I’m working on not thinking of God as ignoring me. I instantly identified when I heard her use the word in reference to God.
Gail spoke of a time when she prayed—“begged,” as she put it—that a beloved aunt with cancer would not die. But the outcome, she said, made her feel that God had turned away. The textbook definition of ignore fit how it felt: refusing to notice. “I was mad at God,” she said. “I knew he was there, but I didn’t go to church for ten years.”
That changed, and now Gail has settled into believing again that God’s listens. Not only does she remind herself that she’s noticed, she keeps in front of her a picture of a God who lends an attentive ear.
It’s not that God will always answer in what we expect, of course. Gail’s idea of what an answer might look like has enlarged to include “not now” or “wait” or “no.” Lots of us know that. In fact, we may so stress that qualification that we leave off asking altogether. But I also sensed that the climate in which her asking feels different, more hopeful.
In my class I was making the point that intercessory—asking—prayers belong in our conversations with God. We are not only permitted to come with requests, we are invited and even urged. We are expected. For, I said, I believe God made us for conversation with him. He likes to hear us talk. He’s counting on us asking. And he promises to listen.
When we want to come to God with requests, whether for others or ourselves, lots of us wonder if it’s okay to approach God with asking. We worry over the whys and won’ts and ins and outs of how God could possibly honor our requests. What’s the point of asking God for anything when he already knows best?
I’ve long wrestled with that puzzle, written about it, explored it as a promise, too, and an invitation. And sometimes the helpful angle comes from an unexpected place, as happened as I was listening to the Kelly Corrigan Wonders podcast the other day. Kelly was talking about human relating and said something that stood my soul at attention. Noting how it’s a gift to offer to listen to another person, she quoted David Augsberger, saying, “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.” Yes, being heard feels like an immensity of kindness. Yes, wise advice for what we can give one another.
But I also immediately thought about God. How his promise to attend to our requests is a great gift. He listens. He hears. So we can come freely with whatever concerns us. If God cares about us, then if something is important enough for us to worry about, isn’t it important enough to pray about?
And I think back to the loss of my dad, my loss of the chance for a final conversation. While I certainly shed tears, while I regretted that I had missed seeing my dad one last time, during that visit to California God answered me with his presence. Somehow I felt lifted, loss and all. And even that unanswered prayer in my journal shaped me. It created a space for God to enter in with his Presence. God drew close. He held me during a dark time.
The response that matters more than any other is knowing we are not alone. In God we find assurance. We may not receive the reprieve or healing or break we hoped for, but in prayer we meet a Presence who can carry us through the pain of what seems to be a meager answer.
And this sense of yearning, full-of-asking prayer doesn’t just concern our daily affairs. We are urged just as much to ask and intercede amid our aching for a world with so much suffering. We pray for a world grieving and suffering the loss of lifeblood and meaning, the refugees and the lost. Much that takes place happens amid a sense of incompleteness, an inbetweenness—as we live between human brokenness and God’s larger restoration. We ask in prayer while looking to the promise of a new world. A new creation we trust is on the way.
Our prayers then become a kind of resistance to the way things seem destined to unfold. And there we find, even in the asking, however the world turns, the best Answer.