The Way to Escape Is Usually a Door and Not a Miracle

I sat on a step with a man who told me he had been praying for eleven years for God to take something away, and had never once considered leaving the room it happens in.

He was not being obtuse. He is a thoughtful man and he had read a great deal about this and had prayed with more seriousness than most people I know.

But what he had been asking for, all eleven years, was a removal. He wanted the thing gone. And I understand that entirely, and it is not a wrong prayer, and I would not tell anybody to stop praying it.

What he had never done was look around.

And when I asked him whether there was anything ordinary and unimpressive he could do about the situation, he named three things in about eleven seconds, and then sat there, because he had known all three of them the whole time.

What the promise actually promises

The verse everybody carries about this is worth reading for what it says rather than for what it is usually quoted as saying.

There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. (1 Corinthians 10:13, King James Version)

Read the last third of it. Will with the temptation also make a way to escape.

That is not a promise of extra strength. It is a promise of a door, and Paul says God makes it, and he says God makes it with the thing itself, which means it is already in place when the situation arrives.

Most people carry that verse as though it said God would give them more capacity. It says something different and more practical. It says there is a way out and that He is the one who put it there.

You have a way out that was made rather than found, and Scripture says He makes it and puts it there alongside the thing itself (1 Corinthians 10:13). The Spirit is the one who shows a person a door they have walked past for eleven years.

Why the door goes unnoticed

Here is the mechanism and it is not anybody's fault.

A person under pressure is looking for something proportionate. The trouble feels enormous, and so they are scanning for something enormous, and an ordinary exit does not register because it is not the right size.

It also frequently costs something socially. Leaving a room early is awkward. Not going somewhere means explaining. Changing an arrangement that has been in place for years means a conversation nobody wants.

So the door is not hidden. It is standing there, and it is inconvenient, and inconvenient is a very effective form of invisible.

There is a story in Kings about exactly this and it is almost comic.

A commander comes a long way to be healed and is told to go and wash in a river seven times, and he is furious, because he had a picture in his head of what a healing looks like and it involved a prophet coming out and waving a hand.

And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean? (2 Kings 5:13)

If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing. His servants can see it and he cannot, and the reason he cannot is that it is too small to be believable.

You are not missing the door because you lack discernment, and the man in that account missed his because it was insultingly ordinary (2 Kings 5:13), and it is His Spirit who makes a small unimpressive thing look like an answer rather than like a dismissal.

Taking the door is not a lesser answer

I want to say something here because a lot of people feel a quiet disappointment about this, and the disappointment is worth respecting rather than dismissing.

If the answer turns out to be a rearranged evening or a different route home or a conversation with one person, it can feel like God did not really do anything, and that the whole thing was just a practical decision anybody could have made.

But the verse says He makes the way. That is not a description of a person being sensible. It is a claim about who put the thing there.

And the ordinary is where He works most of the time, which anybody who has read the Gospels carefully already knows. A bit of bread. A borrowed boat. Some mud. A question at a well.

You have been looking for the wrong size of answer, and every one of those was small enough to be missed by somebody scanning for something larger (2 Kings 5:13), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who makes an unimpressive thing recognizable as an act of God.

You are not receiving a lesser answer, and the verse attributes the making of that door to God rather than to your own good sense (1 Corinthians 10:13). That work is the Spirit's, and He arranges what looks in retrospect exactly like an ordinary decision.

And the petition asks for precisely this. Deliver us from evil. It does not specify the mechanism, and there is nothing in it that requires the deliverance to be spectacular.

And this belongs here plainly, in every article in this category. Where the situation is genuinely dangerous, to the person in it or to anybody else, the door is not an article. Tell somebody today: a doctor, a counselor, a sponsor, a pastor you trust, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength, and going early is wisdom.