When God Answers a Prayer

THIS BOOK HAS OWED you an answer since the prologue, and the question is the title of this chapter: what actually happens when God answers a prayer? Here is the answer, stated plainly, before I earn it. When God gives, He gives in a way that enlarges the soul's capacity for communion. The gift is more than the thing received. Folded inside it is a widening of love, and the widening is the greater part, because a soul that has not been enlarged can only clutch what it is handed, and clutching ruins both the gift and the hand. An answered prayer, seen whole, turns out to be a person: the one you have become in the hands of the God you kept asking. I did not reason my way to that sentence. I learned it from the longest prayer of my life, one I have kept back until this final chapter because for most of my life I could not bear to tell it at all.

When I was a young man finishing my studies, a calling took hold of me and would not let go: to spend my life serving God's people. I went to a teacher I respected, someone whose blessing I had quietly counted on, and for the first time said the thing out loud. The answer came back swift and firm. The world needed me in the work I had trained for; this other desire was a waste of a good mind. I walked out of that study with my ears burning, and I did what a young man does with a wound of that kind. I buried the calling and told no one for years. That voice was not the last. Over the decades others joined it, and their judgment had earned real authority in my life, so each one left me turning the same question over in the dark: if this desire is from God, why do the people I most respect keep standing in its way?

The burial did not take. I have since learned that this is one of the surest marks of a calling: you cannot get it to stay in the ground. I starved it, argued with it, buried it under work, and every time it surfaced stronger than before. I wrote constantly about the things of God and told myself it was only a pastime. Strangers who read those words assumed I was already clergy and had to be corrected. People in our community began treating me as their shepherd though I held no office among them. At night I sometimes dreamed of standing before God's people in His house, serving them, and woke with an ache I refused to name. Strangest of all, I never once admitted the desire in my prayers. I circled it on my knees, talking to God about everything adjacent to it.

And the facts against it were not soft. I was a married man with a family and obligations no amount of prayer could dissolve. The way toward that service was, by every honest measure, financially impossible, and I am not speaking loosely. I ran those numbers for years, the way I had once run mortgage arithmetic at three in the morning, and they never once came out. I told the Lord so, plainly and more than once: my humanity cannot see the path. So I surrendered the calling to Him. Then I took it back, and surrendered it again, until the surrendering itself had become a rhythm of my life. Twice I tried to quit outright, and the two older men who guided my soul refused the resignation. Rest a while, they told me. You cannot resign from a post nobody has given you. I rested, and the desire was always waiting for me when I stood back up.

Decades went by like that, and I want you to weigh the word: decades. A man can carry a thing so long that the carrying becomes the whole of his relationship to it, and somewhere along the way he stops expecting to set it down. If an answered prayer means the prompt arrival of the thing named at the start, my prayer failed for thirty years, and by that measure so has the one you brought with you into these pages. I no longer believe that measure. Showing you why is the last debt I owe you.

Begin, then, with the claim I opened with: when God gives, He gives so that the soul is enlarged for Him. Abraham asked for a son and was given, along with the son, twenty-five years in which the asking slowly ripened into the knowledge of God. The man who finally held Isaac could hold him on an open palm. The man who first asked could not have. The thing arrives, when it arrives, inside a person who has been remade around the asking, because God will not lower a holy weight into a grip that would crush it, and most of our grips, at the start, would. Heaven does not entrust weight to a soul incapable of bearing it, and the burden itself begins shaping the shoulders that will one day carry it.

Desire, when first voiced, is too narrow to bear what it seeks. It wants fulfillment without transformation, arrival without passage. I say that with tenderness toward first desires, because they are where every prayer begins. Mine had my own face all over it.

Somewhere inside my first wanting stood a young man who wished to be seen standing in a holy place, who wanted the ache dignified, who wanted, if I am honest, the teacher proven wrong. God heard that prayer, and He took the desire more seriously than I took it myself. He did not mock the desire by refusing it, nor did He indulge it by granting it unchanged. He led it through fire. The fire had three names: delay, frustration, and unknowing. For years I felt each one as an evasion. They were purifications. In that slow burning a desire is stripped of its demand to control and taught instead how to consent, and what comes out the far side is a longing capable of receiving.

I can tell you exactly what the fire burned off of mine. The romance went first. Across the long years of carrying, I saw the work I longed for up close, often enough to learn that it is labor, mostly hidden and frequently thankless, and that God hands those He sets apart no private staircase to Himself. The need for recognition went next. There was a season when I ached for someone with authority over the way to look at me and say, yes, we see it too, and God withheld that word until I could live without it. I have wondered since whether the withholding lasted precisely as long as the need.

And while those things burned off, something else was being built quietly in their place. I found I could live the heart of the calling without the office. I could serve whoever stood in front of me, teach the ones who asked, pray beside the ones who wept, and the ministry God had already given me began to be enough. That was the most dangerous mercy of all. On the day the desire could finally say to God, keep it if You will, I lack nothing, it had at last become safe to grant.

None of this makes God a means to an end. The Gospel never presents God as power to be leveraged. It presents Him as life to be entered. Prayer, then, is not the art of persuading heaven but the school of communion, and its deepest work is aligning the will with the living God who gives Himself before He gives anything else.

The answer to a long prayer begins long before the prayer looks fulfilled. To see why, you have to know how the promises of God work, because a promise misread will break your faith on schedule. Paul writes:

For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen, to the glory of God through us. (2 Corinthians 1:20 NKJV)

A promise of God is covenantal speech. It binds Him to His people, and in the same breath it binds the people to a path of becoming. We usually hear only the first binding and go deaf to the second. God keeps His word by reshaping the heart that received it, widening it until it can hold what He meant to give all along, and He works at the speed of hearts, which is slow. A promise unfolds over time because it unfolds within persons. Fulfillment is the revelation of what the waiting has been doing all along. The waiting was the inside of the promise, and the day of fulfillment turns the lights on so that you can finally see what has been under construction there.

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BY THE TIME THE way toward my calling began to look possible, I was no longer young, and a new obstacle had taken the place of the money: consent. The path could be opened only by others.

There were people set over it, rightly so, whose agreement the way required, and word kept reaching me that their agreement was far from sure. I had carried the thing through ridicule and through impossible arithmetic, and now, within sight of the end, I felt my heart failing over a handful of human decisions.

Then one night I had a dream. I will tell it plainly, and you are free to make of it whatever you make of such things; I can only report what happened. In the dream I was arguing with Jesus.

"What if they never agree?" I asked Him. "If they say no, will You say no with them?"

And He said, "I am not beneath them. I am the Head of My Church."

I woke with those words standing in the room. Let me set the fences around this. The words gave me no license to defy anyone. Even in the dream, I understood that if the calling was truly His, He would open the way honestly through the very hearts whose consent it required. A human heart is no harder for Him to move than a sea. And I hold the dream itself the way I hold every private experience of this kind: such things are rare, they carry no authority beyond what Scripture already says in plain daylight, and the believer who never has one is missing nothing he needs. Mine said only what was already written, on a night I had stopped being able to hear it.

What the words did was relocate the entire question. For years I had been asking whether the people over the way would ever say yes, as though the calling were finally theirs to grant or refuse. It had never been theirs. Christ Himself is the Head of His Church, and a calling is a matter between the Head and the member long before it becomes a matter of anyone's signature. I got up from that dream lighter than I had been in months. And I noticed something that has instructed me ever since: at no point in the argument had Jesus disputed the calling. I went into that dream doubting it. He did not.

Then it came, in God's own hour, an hour that had never once consulted mine. Late in my life, past the age at which such doors are supposed to open, the way opened, by hands I had never thought to hope in. I had spent decades drawing maps for God, showing Him the three or four routes by which the thing could conceivably happen. He used none of them. I will not lay the details out here; they belong partly to others, and your way, if He opens one, will look nothing like mine.

What I can hand you instead is the sentence those years wrote into me, and I say it now to anyone who carries a calling he can neither fund nor explain. My humanity simply fails to see the path of His calling. God is not a human. Nothing can stop Him if He has a will. He is even more convicted of my calling than I am. I do not know how He does it. He simply opens the path in a way I had never imagined before.

Standing in the open door, I understood the years. Every one I had counted as lost had been at work. The man who walked through was one the young fellow in that teacher's study could never have been: proven wrong about God a hundred instructive times, weaned off applause, able at last to hold the calling loosely enough to be trusted with it. If God had granted the request in the year I first made it, He would have been answering a different man, and a far smaller prayer. And He had known all along that He would grant it. That is the part that still quiets me. Through every season in which I doubted the calling, argued with it, tried to hand it back, God kept it alive in me the way a woman keeps coals alive overnight, banked and hidden, against the morning she means to light the fire.

God does the same with whole nations. He said once, through Jeremiah, to a people in exile whose way home would stay shut for seventy years:

Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:12-13)

Notice where the finding happens: inside the search, once the search has taken the whole heart. The seventy years were the taking. What Israel found at the end of them, before they ever found Jerusalem, was God.

One more prayer belongs in this chapter, and it is His. On the night He was betrayed, before the garden and the arrest, Jesus prayed a long prayer aloud, and John, who was in the room that night, wrote the whole of it down. He prayed for Himself, that the Father would glorify the Son. He prayed for the men at the table. Then He lifted His eyes past them, down the length of the centuries, and said this:

I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word. (John 17:20)

Take a census of that sentence. Who has believed in Jesus through the apostles' word? Every Christian there has ever been. Their word has come down the centuries hand to hand, in sermons, in mothers' bedtime Bible stories, in worn paperback Gospels, and there is no other door into the faith. If you believe in Jesus, you came in through it, and you stand inside His sentence.

So do I. Hours before His own suffering, Jesus prayed for you by description, and the description fits exactly. Before you ever prayed, you were prayed for. Your first fumbling prayer joined a conversation about you that was already old.

And in the same prayer He defined the gift He was asking His Father to give us:

And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. (John 17:3)

Weigh the definition. Eternal life is to know God, and "know," in Scripture's mouth, is a word for persons: the knowing between friends, the knowing of a child who can tell his father's step in the hall. What Jesus requested for us that night was communion, a share in the life He and the Father have lived together since before the world was. The gift He asked His Father to give you is God Himself.

Now set your praying inside His. Every request you have ever brought to God, He anticipated at that table. Your being joined into the life of God is the granting of what He asked. Which means every answered prayer of yours, from the first daily bread onward, is a piece of the answer to a prayer of His.

So when God grants what we ask, something greater than granting has occurred. The old word for it is incorporation, a body word: we are joined further into the life of the One who answers, not as beneficiaries standing at a distance, but as participants whose desires have begun to echo His own. We are drawn into God's own movement of giving, the generosity that was flowing before we ever asked, and our request turns out to have been a door into that current. This is why a true answer always exceeds the request, and why Paul, straining to say how far the exceeding goes, gives up argument for doxology:

Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21)

Read it slowly and you can hear the mechanics inside the music: according to the power that works in us. The exceeding abundance reaches us from the inside out, by a power already at work in us. God out-answers our prayers from within them, enlarging the one who asks until the asking and His own desire begin to agree, and Scripture gives that agreement a face. "For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren" (Romans 8:29). The final shape of every answered prayer is a person who has come to resemble Jesus at the exact place where the prayer was carried.

Set in that light, Paul's most quoted sentence stops being a pleasantry. "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28). The good toward which all things are working is defined in the very next verse: conformity to the Son. Paul then follows the chain hand over hand, called, justified, glorified, and when he reaches the end of it he turns around and asks, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" (Romans 8:31). Then he writes the sentence that has become the floor under every prayer I have ever prayed:

He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

With Him. That is where the all things are kept. God answered the human race with His Son, and everything else He will ever give us comes wrapped in Him, inseparable from Him, carried in His hands. When you ask God for anything at all, the anything travels to you inside that first gift, and a person who refuses the first gift will find the second strangely hollow, however exactly it matches the request. This is why no honest prayer is ever wasted on a God like this. Having already given us the greatest thing at the greatest cost, He is not going to grow stingy over the lesser things. The cross has settled His intentions toward us for good, and every answer since, whatever its shape, comes from the far side of that settlement.

Now the answer I stated at the top of this chapter can carry its full weight. An answered prayer, seen whole, is a person: desire led through fire until it can consent, capacity enlarged until it can receive, a life joined so far into God's that its longings begin to echo His own. The requests themselves matter, every one. He numbers hairs, He keeps our tears in His bottle, and many of the things we name He gives, some late, some transfigured, a few to the letter. But beneath every request, all along, something else was being asked, and something else was being given. Prayer is answered not when the request is met, but when the one who asks has become capable of receiving what God is always giving: Himself.

I still spend my days among people who are carrying prayers the way I carried mine, and I have learned to watch for the moment when a person begins to receive Him inside the waiting; you can see it arrive in a face. I have also learned what lies at the very bottom of the carrying. Follow any prayer down far enough, beneath the request, beneath even the longing for God that the request was hiding, and you come to one question, the question every prayer is secretly asking and almost no one says aloud.

We ask it at hospital bedsides, beside open graves, and while lying awake before dawn. Every petition for healing, reunion, or one more year gives that question a particular form: Are those we love, and are we ourselves, going down into silence or into hands? Everything I have told you hangs on how God answers it. He has answered it, once, in history, early on a morning that has changed every graveside since, and that morning is the last place I have to take you.