Last night I had a moment where I felt that God was not listening to me, or maybe he doesn’t understand me because I have been asking for the same things for a long time, and for some reason, I have not received them. For some reason, He wants to keep me waiting. For some reason, He keeps making the lessons difficult.
At first, I thought maybe I didn’t say what I wanted accurately. I looked at the prayers and spoke to Him in different languages and asked Him what I wanted in many different ways because I thought that if I could perfect my words and my prayers, it would make a difference. Like maybe He would pay more attention if I had the right words to say.
I thought that if I received a perfect prayer, God would not reject it. But then I saw God knows what is in your heart whether you say it or not. God knows what you want without you speaking. God does not need reminders. God never forgets.
He never forgot what you wished for last year or ten years ago. He has not forgotten your prayers. He has not forgotten the night you cried to him because you had no one else. He knows what is in your heart.
The truth is, God will not always give you what you ask for no matter how hard you pray or what type of prayer you use. He will not always make things easy for you. He will not give you things just because you insist or beg. Because He knows what is truly in your heart, He knows what is best for you.
Know what your heart needs, not what your heart wants. He knows what will heal your heart forever, not temporarily. He knows what will soften your heart. You know your heart better than yourself. God wants you to know that, at the end of the day, your heart is in His hands. It belongs to Him.
So you can beat around the bush, pretend he doesn’t know, read all the prayers you can find, but it won’t change his mind. It will not change His plan. You will not persuade Him that your plan is better. Maybe God doesn’t want you to say everything out loud.
Maybe He just wants you to have faith in His peace-in the times when you feel like he is not there, in the days when you can’t get out of bed because life is meaningless, at night when you can’t sleep because your heart is heavy, in the weeks or months when you feel dead inside because you don’t remember the last thing that makes you feel alive.
Maybe it’s not so much about what we tell God but more about what he’s trying to tell us. Maybe we are so busy talking and telling Him what we need that we forget to step back and listen to His answers, look at how our lives are unfolding, and look for the signs He is sending.
Perhaps we find God quieter—when we don’t know what to say, when we can’t express how we feel, when the world doesn’t work anymore. This is when we feel most connected to Him. If we trust him to heal our hearts because we know very well that if we leave it to him, He will not break our hearts.
