The Fourth Answer

THERE IS A FOURTH answer to prayer, and nobody stood up in church to warn me about it. The fourth answer is silence: you ask, and nothing comes back at all. The claim of this chapter is that the silence is God hiding, and that His hiding is an invitation to come closer. I know how strange that sounds from inside the quiet, so I will earn it slowly, from Scripture and from two rooms I have stood in.

Start with the teaching I was given. We have all heard that God answers prayer three ways: Yes, No, and Wait. I repeated it for years, as confidently as it had been handed to me. It preaches well, and it counts out neatly on three fingers, which for a young believer with a Bible in his hands is most of what a teaching needs. And there is real truth in it. I have received all three answers in my own life, and I have learned, slowly and with a great deal of complaining, to honor the No and the Wait as answers in full standing, given by the same love that gives the Yes. My quarrel is only with what it leaves out. Three answers make a tidy world, and whatever happens to your prayer there is a shelf to set it on, and a shelf is a great comfort. Pray long enough, though, and one prayer comes home with no shelf to receive it. It is the most dreadful of the four, and it breeds an uncertainty the other three never do.

Silence gets confused with its three neighbors, so let me set it apart carefully. A No is painful, and later in this book a whole chapter waits for the No that lasts a lifetime, but a No is at least a word. Someone spoke to you. You were refused, and even a refusal is a kind of relationship. Wait is a word too, though I have come to suspect that much of what we piously report as Wait is really silence that embarrassed us, dressed up in something more respectable. True silence stands apart from both. You ask, and nothing comes back. No door closes, which would at least be information, and no door opens. You search your life for the sin that must be blocking the line. You fast. You enlist praying friends whose prayers you secretly rate above your own. You ask in tears at midnight and with dry discipline at noon, and the result is the same result, which is no result. Underneath every other question a colder one begins to form: is anyone there at all?

This silence comes in matters large and small. I have knelt and asked God plainly which of two honest roads He wanted me to walk, both of them mine to take for His sake, and risen from my knees knowing exactly as much as when I knelt down. Why is He silent at a moment like that? Why does He throw the whole weight of the choice back onto us, as though it were ours alone to carry? I have carried petitions for people I loved through years of asking and heard nothing I could honestly call a reply. Other people have handed me silences deeper than my own. A woman who prayed a decade over a wandering child told me the quiet was harder to bear than the fear.

A man once described his prayer life to me in the flat voice of someone reading off the weather. He had stopped expecting anything when he prayed, he said, the way you stop writing letters to an address that has never once written back. I understood him better than I let on at the time. Speaking day after day into a room where nothing moves produces a fatigue all its own, and I have come to believe that fatigue has emptied more pews than every argument against God ever printed.

Here is the cruelest thing the silence does: it turns us into interpreters, and we are terrible interpreters of quiet. Given nothing to read, we write the message ourselves, and the message we write runs almost always against us. He is angry with me. I asked wrongly. I am beneath His notice. Some of the most faithful people I have ever known have handed me those self-composed verdicts in tears, certain they were reading God's verdict, when all they were holding was a blank page and their own fear. I did the same for years. A man can live a long time inside a condemnation God never issued. So before anything else, I want to take the pen out of that anxious hand, yours and mine, and look at what the Scriptures actually show us about the God who goes quiet.

The Bible knows this silence from the inside. Those who suffer it usually assume they have wandered off the map of faith, when in fact they are standing in the dead center of it. One whole book of Scripture opens with a man shouting at the sky. Habakkuk was a prophet, a professional listener to God if ever there was one, and the first words of his book are a complaint filed against heaven:

O LORD, how long shall I cry, And You will not hear? Even cry out to You, "Violence!" And You will not save. (Habak-kuk 1:2 NKJV)

Notice what the verse assumes. The crying has gone on a long time; the words how long tell you it has outlasted every reasonable patience. Notice too that the prophet's faith is fully intact. He still addresses the LORD. He still believes God hears and saves in general, and that very belief is what makes the silence unbearable in particular. And God let the complaint stand. When the Scriptures were gathered, no one smoothed that opening into something more devotional, and the protest against the silence sits preserved inside the very book we hold in our hands. At the very least it tells us God is not ashamed of the question, and He does not ask us to pretend we have heard what we have not heard.

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YEARS AGO I STOOD at the bedside of someone I loved, moments after he died. I was in that room as a clergyman, among other things, and a clergyman is supposed to know what to do there. Out in the corridor I had rehearsed it. I would pray aloud, say something noble and true, maybe quote Scripture, the way I had done at other bedsides for other families. Then I stepped inside, and death was close in a way it had never once been close to me before. The room was still, unnaturally still. The air itself felt torn. There were no cries and no last embraces, only an unbearable silence that screamed with absence. Everything I had prepared collapsed, and when death stood that close all I could do was tremble.

It took me years to understand that trembling. The world had come undone in front of me. Every category I trusted collapsed at once: time, presence, hope, all of it, and yet something in the wreckage was holy. I had expected, if I felt God at all in that room, to feel Him far away. What I felt instead was His nearness, and the nearness was terrifying, a summons more than a comfort. I did not dare to speak. Anything I said would have been too small, too shallow, for what was in the room. I had walked in expecting to close a story with a prayer. I stood before a silence too large for words.

Years later, reading the end of Mark's Gospel, I recognized where I had been standing. Mark tells how the women came to the tomb at dawn with spices, carrying the last gestures of love in a world still governed by death. They found the stone rolled away, the body gone, and a messenger announcing news too large for any human frame to hold. Mark sets down what happened next in a single astonishing sentence:

So they went out quickly and fled from the tomb, for they trembled and were amazed. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:8)

That sentence troubled me for years. It read like a failure of nerve in the women, plain fear standing exactly where the joy should have been. The hospital room cured me of the objection. The women fled because they had seen too much. Their fear was not superstition and not weakness; it was the holy trembling that seizes a soul the moment it finds itself inside a divine power unleashed not as thunder but as emptiness. Their silence was not failure. It was liturgy, adoration through collapse, the soul falling prostrate before a mystery it could not contain. To them the empty tomb felt like the ground giving way, and in a sense they were right; everything they knew about how the world works had just been overruled. But the tomb was empty because Christ had gone ahead of them, into Galilee, into the whole future. What looked like absence was the opening hour of the resurrection. I now believe that everyone who prays into the silence stands somewhere near that early tomb. The feeling that God has withdrawn may be the truest signal we ever receive that He has gone ahead of us, calling us forward to where He already is.

This past year the silence came for me again, and this time it lingered. Someone I loved lay in a hospital, slowly approaching the threshold of eternity. For days I kept vigil in a room where the loudest sounds were machines. I have spent more years beside such beds than I can count, praying with the dying and sitting with the mourning, and I owned a whole vocabulary for those rooms: Scripture, prayer, quiet presence, the language the church has always used to walk people through grief. When the dying man was mine to lose, the vocabulary shrank. I prayed, and my prayers seemed to rise into the same quiet the machines ticked against. I knew every consoling thing that could be said, because I had said them all at other bedsides. Knowing them, I discovered, is a different thing from being helped by them.

One afternoon a nurse found me in the hallway. She was doing nothing official. She had simply noticed, the way some people notice, that the man who was supposed to be the strong one was worn through. She looked at me and said the sentence I have carried ever since.

"It is okay to grieve, since grief is an expression of love."

For years I had said things like that to other people, always from the giving end of the sentence, and I can tell you it lands with a different weight on the receiving end. She comforted the comforter. As far as she knew she was only being kind to a tired stranger, yet her quiet kindness carried a grace as deep as any sermon I have preached or heard. Her sentence was also sound theology. Grief rises out of love and out of nowhere else, and the depth of the sorrow measures the size of the gift. A heart full of resurrection hope still weeps, because hope answers death without erasing the love that death interrupts. I have gone back many times to what was really happening in that hallway. Heaven stayed silent over my petitions in exactly the way I have been describing, and all the while a mercy was making its way to me down a hospital corridor on ordinary human feet. The silence above me was never as empty as it felt.

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EVEN JESUS MET THE fourth answer. Whenever I doubt that silence belongs anywhere inside the life of faith, I go back to the darkest afternoon in history. Matthew records that about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and the words He reached for were already a thousand years old, the opening line of the twenty-second psalm:

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping Me, And from the words of My groaning? (Psalm 22:1)

Sit with that as long as you can bear to. The eternal Son had lived every hour of His earthly life in unbroken communion with the Father, and at noon the sky went dark, and He passed through the silence all the way down. What He did with it is the part I want you to see: He prayed it. He took up the oldest scream of the silence-stricken, a psalm His people had cried for centuries, and made it His own. Everyone who has ever prayed into the quiet has therefore prayed in His company, with His voice alongside theirs. Notice how the prayer begins.

My God, My God: twice over, the language of covenant, of a bond still claimed. The prayer accuses God of forsaking and clings to Him in the same breath. Further down, the same psalm dares to say what the darkness could not see: "Nor has He hidden His face from Him; But when He cried to Him, He heard" (Psalm 22:24). The psalm carries the felt forsakenness and the fact of being heard side by side, all the way to its end. His silence is not His absence, and His delay is not His denial; the same God who permitted the darkness of Good Friday brought forth the light of Easter morning. Three days after Jesus prayed it, the empty tomb showed which of the two ran deeper.

Now let me state plainly the conviction the silence has hammered into me over the years, the one I set down at the start. God is not absent. He is hidden. And hiddenness is not abandonment. It is how He invites us deeper. An absent God would be a closed door and the end of the story. A hidden God is present the whole time, the way the sun is present above an overcast sky, and His hiding has a purpose. Isaiah ran into this mystery and left it standing in his book as praise: "Truly You are God, who hide Yourself, O God of Israel, the Savior!" (Isaiah 45:15). Read that slowly. In a single breath the prophet calls Him hidden and calls Him Savior, and he feels not the slightest contradiction, because he has grasped something true about the hiding.

Anyone who has ever hidden from a small child knows the difference between hiding and leaving. When you hide from a child you choose a spot where you can still hear her. You leave a shoe showing at the edge of the curtain. You are more attentive in your hiding than you ever were in plain view, and the whole game exists so that she will come looking and shriek with joy at the finding. If she shrugged and wandered off, it would break your heart. I say this reverently: something like that game is being played with us, at depths where it stops being a game.

God conceals Himself from our feelings and our evidence while staying within reach of our seeking, because the seeking draws us farther in than any instant answer ever would. The silence works on our questions too, slowly, over years. For a long time I came to God demanding to know why. Chasing the why leaves a soul restless, because the explanation, even on the rare day it comes, never quite reaches the ache underneath it. The silence outlasted every why I had, until the question underneath finally surfaced, which was Who. God does not always hand us the answer we came for, but He always offers us Himself. In all my years of praying I have received very few explanations. I have received Him. That exchange gets made in the silence, and I no longer believe it could be made anywhere else.

I will not pretend the invitation is always accepted. I have watched people meet the silence and step away. They rarely step into loud unbelief; mostly they drift into indifference, or into a competent self-reliance that keeps the forms of faith while expecting nothing from them. Some place God on a shelf like a beautiful relic of their youth, still revered, no longer spoken to as a friend. Many of them come back years later, and I have listened to enough of them to report the pattern: they return because the hunger would not die, and nothing else they fed it with could fill it.

Maybe you are in the silence now, frightened that your faith was an illusion all along. I will give you the answer I once gave a man who said exactly that to me. Illusions do not bleed. Illusions do not cry out in the night or ache for a voice they cannot hear. Your faith is wounded, and only living things can be wounded. Let the silence become a sanctuary, a hidden room where your soul keeps vigil with Christ. On the days when you cannot form words in it, let your tears and your tiredness do the praying.

If you need a witness that great love and great silence can share the same soul for a lifetime, the last century handed us one, and her letters are in print for anyone to check. Mother Teresa spent decades lifting the dying off the streets, and the world watched her do it with a face full of joy. After her death her private letters came out in a book called Come Be My Light, and they revealed what almost no one had guessed. From nearly the start of that work until nearly its end, she lived in interior darkness, with scarcely a felt trace of the God she served. "The silence and the emptiness is so great," she wrote to a trusted counselor, "that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear." Some people read those letters as the unmasking of a hypocrite.

I read them as one of the great documents of fidelity ever written. Here was a woman who kept lifting the dying out of gutters, year after year, on the strength of a love she could no longer feel, praying to a God who gave her nothing to go on except everything He had already given. Her hands stayed open and her vows held, which is what faith looks like when the warmth is gone: the persistent choice to trust God's goodness across His silence. If silence were the signature of rejection, then the person it covered most completely in living memory was also among the people most visibly consumed by the love of God, and those two facts refuse to fit that theory. The honest conclusion is simpler and stranger: His silence and His love travel together far more often than we were told.

One more sentence of Scripture has done more against the terror of the fourth answer than anything else I know. When Lazarus of Bethany fell sick, his sisters sent an urgent message to Jesus: "Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick" (John 11:3). Then they waited, and no one came. Anyone who has kept a vigil knows what those days were like: the sound of labored breathing, the eyes going again and again to the door. And the Gospel writer, setting it all down years afterward, joins the facts of the story in a way no publicist would ever have allowed:

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was. (John 11:5-6)

Read the hinge of that sentence again. He loved them; so He stayed. Our whole theology of silence expects the word although in there, and John chose so, as though the love and the delay flowed from a single purpose, as though the two silent days were themselves something love was doing. The rest of that story can wait for its own place in this book, except for one detail that belongs here: when Jesus finally stood at His friend's tomb, He wept (John 11:35). The nurse in my hallway had the Gospel on her side. Grief is an expression of love, and so, evidently, is delay.

That is the hardest sentence I have written so far, and I would never have dared to write it if John had not written it first.

So when the fourth answer comes to you, and if you keep praying it will, it arrives from inside a love the silence never suspends. What remains is the question I carried out of every quiet room of my life: what is that love doing during the two days, and the two years, and the twenty? After a long time I can tell you where to look for the work. It is closer than the sky you keep searching. Watch what is quietly happening in the one who waits.