The Cry Went Up for Four Hundred Years Before the Sentence That Answers It

A woman sat in her car outside my house for about twenty minutes before she came in, and when she did come in she said seven words and then did not say anything else for a while.

She said: I have been asking for eleven years.

That was the whole of it. She did not describe the situation and I did not ask her to, and she has told me since that not being asked was the reason she stayed.

Eleven years is a long time to hold a prayer, and the thing that had begun to trouble her was not whether God could do it. It was what the eleven years meant.

She had begun to read the silence as an answer. Not a refusal exactly. Something more like an absence, as though the matter had been filed somewhere and forgotten, and she had been quietly assembling a picture of a God who had moved on.

And there is a stretch in Exodus that speaks to exactly that, and almost everybody skips it, because it sits between two chapters that are much more interesting.

Four verbs at the end of chapter two

The famous part is chapter three. The bush, the voice, the sending. Everybody knows it.

But the sentence just before it, at the end of chapter two, is the one for somebody eleven years in.

And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God had respect unto them. (Exodus 2:24 and 25, King James Version)

Four verbs, and God is the subject of every one of them.

Heard. Remembered. Looked. Had respect unto them.

And here is what matters most about them. Every one of those had already happened before anything visible changed. Nobody in Egypt saw a bush. Nobody knew there was a man in Midian. From inside the situation, at the moment those four verbs were true, the situation was identical to what it had been the day before.

You are inside a stretch where four things are true that nothing visible reports (Exodus 2:24), and it is His Spirit who makes an invisible list of verbs into something a person can stand on at year eleven.

What the silence was not

I want to name what that passage rules out, because it rules out exactly what the woman in my car was assembling.

It rules out forgetting. God remembered his covenant is in the text, and remembering in Hebrew is not the recovery of a lost fact. It is the acting on something held.

It rules out inattention. God looked upon them is a verb of deliberate regard.

And it rules out indifference, which is what had respect unto them means, and the older sense of that phrase is closer to He knew them.

None of that changed the brick quotas that week. The passage is careful about that, and the next thing that happens after those four verbs is a chapter about a man in a desert with sheep who has no idea any of this is happening.

You are not forgotten, and the text puts remembering, looking and knowing in one sentence in the middle of the silence (Exodus 2:25), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who applies a list like that to somebody who has been assembling a picture of a God who moved on.

The lament is allowed to stay unanswered

I am not going to close this article by turning eleven years into a lesson, and I want to say why.

Scripture does not do that. The eighty-eighth psalm ends in the dark with no resolution at all, and it was kept in the songbook exactly as it stands, and it has been sung by the people of God for millennia without anybody adding a final verse.

And three men in a furnace say out loud, in front of the king, that God is able to deliver them and then say but if not, and they are not corrected for saying the second half.

That is what honest faith looks like in the book. It does not require a person to predict the outcome and it does not require them to pretend.

Which is worth having at year eleven, because by then most people have been told, gently, by somebody who loves them, to be more positive about it. That advice is well meant and it is not in Scripture anywhere.

You are not required to be positive about it, and the two most honest passages in the Bible on this subject end in a furnace and in the dark (Psalm 88). That work is the Spirit's, and He keeps a person in the conversation without any pretending in it at all.

You are permitted to leave it unresolved, and Scripture keeps both a psalm that ends in darkness and a sentence beginning but if not (Daniel 3:18), and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a person inside something that has not finished.

And this belongs here plainly, and it is never a footnote in this category. If what you are carrying has taken you to the place where being here at all has come into question, do not hold it alone tonight. Tell a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength, and eleven years is exactly when it matters most.