I Cry and Thou Hearest Not

He was seven when he learned it, in a kitchen, from a woman he loved.

His grandmother was scrubbing a pan and one of his uncles had said something bitter about God, and she did not turn round, and she said: we do not talk like that in here.

That is the whole lesson. He has never forgotten it and he has never once broken it, and he is fifty-five.

So there is a thing he has never said. He has prayed for his daughter for nine years about a situation I will not describe because he has never described it to anyone either. Nine years, most days. Nothing has changed except that it has got slightly worse in a way that is hard to point at.

And he has never said, out loud, to God: You are not answering me.

He would tell you that is faith. He half believes it. He calls it patience, and there is real patience in him, so the label sticks.

But there is something else in the room and it has been there a good while. It sits under the patience. It comes out sideways in how he is with people at church who talk easily about answered prayer, and in the fact that he cannot listen to certain songs any more, and in the way he has begun to pray in a slightly formal register, the way you write to somebody you are angry with and do not want to give the satisfaction.

What he is really afraid of is that the sentence is a door. That if he says it once, he will find out he has meant it for years, and that will be the beginning of the end of everything.

The sentence is already in the book

I want to show you your unsayable sentence, printed in Scripture, in the mouth of the man God called after His own heart.

O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.Psalm 22:2

That is it. That is your sentence. It is not softened, it is not hedged, and it is addressed directly to God rather than muttered about Him.

Thou hearest not. Second person. To His face.

And it is not tucked away in an obscure corner. It is Psalm 22, which is the psalm Jesus quoted from the cross. He took the opening line of that same psalm into His own mouth at the worst hour in the history of the world.

You have been holding a sentence out of your mouth that is already inside the book in the mouth of a king, and quoted at Calvary by the Son of God. That is not me stretching a text to license complaint; Psalm 22:2 is written exactly that way and was preserved rather than corrected, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and stands it in a kitchen where a boy of seven was told we do not talk like that in here.

Why the door is not a door

Now let me take the fear apart, because I think it is the actual obstacle and not the grandmother.

You believe the sentence is a door: say it, and you will discover you meant it, and the discovery will start something that does not stop.

But look at what is happening while you do not say it. It has not gone anywhere. It has been in you for years, working, coming out in your register and your reactions and the songs you skip. Not saying a thing to God has never once removed it from a man.

The unsaid version is the dangerous one. It has no address on it, so it never goes anywhere, and it just accumulates and quietly reshapes how a man prays.

You have not been protecting your faith, you have been carrying something with nowhere to put it. The written word puts that exact complaint into a prayer and addresses it directly to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept a man praying most days for nine years while he was holding one sentence back.

And here is the thing about your grandmother, and I want to be fair to her. She was not wrong that there is a way of talking about God that corrodes a house. Her uncle was talking about God, bitterly, to a room. That is a different act from talking to God, honestly, in the second person.

David does not complain about God in Psalm 22. He complains to Him. That is not a small distinction; it is the whole distinction, and nobody ever explained it to a seven-year-old at a sink.

You were taught a rule about one thing and have been applying it to another for forty-eight years. Scripture is full of men saying hard things straight to God and never once treats it as the beginning of unbelief, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been keeping your mouth shut.