Prayer while waiting for an answer: the days in between

Some waiting has no end in sight. This is not that kind. A test result will come on Thursday or Monday. A committee meets on a known date. Someone has promised to call back. The answer already exists somewhere, or soon will, and you know roughly when. It is simply not yours to give.

It is a particular kind of waiting, and it has its own tiredness. It does not ask you to hold on for a long time, like the waiting that the prayer for patience is about. It asks you to get through a few days without letting them drain away.

What waiting does to the days

Until the answer comes, everything goes into brackets. You plan nothing past Thursday. You answer people with half your attention. You sleep badly, not because you are afraid of the night but because the morning brings the news closer. The days in between turn into a waiting room: you are in them, but you are not living in them.

And prayer often takes the same shape. You say the request again, morning and evening, in the same words, a bit like following up on a file. One entry in the Manna notebook described that gesture from the inside, the inbox you keep refreshing twenty times a day, and the prayer that ends up looking just like it.

This page would like to offer something else: a prayer that is no longer about the answer, because the answer has already been asked for, but about the days that are left before it.

A prayer while waiting for an answer

Here is a prayer written for this page. It is meant for the morning, once, and it does not need repeating during the day.

Lord, I am waiting for an answer that is not mine to give. You heard my request on the first day: if I say it again, let it be to speak to You, not to chase You. Give me back the days in between, the faces, the sleep, the work. And when the news comes, whatever it is, find me standing in my own life.

“Whatever it is” is the hard line. It does not ask you to resign yourself in advance, or to pretend the outcome hardly matters to you. You can want one answer rather than another with everything you have, and say so. It only asks that your life not hang on the outcome so completely that it stops existing until then.

”From the first day”

The book of Daniel holds an account of waiting that is unusually exact. Chapter 10 opens with a length of time: “In those days I, Daniel, was mourning three whole weeks” (Daniel 10:2). He fasts, he tries to understand, and nothing comes. When the three weeks are over, someone appears on the riverbank and says to him:

Don’t be afraid, Daniel; for from the first day that you set your heart to understand, and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard: and I have come for your words’ sake.

Daniel 10:12 (World English Bible)

The text pulls apart two things that waiting always runs together. The words were heard on the first day. The answer arrives three weeks later. In between there was no silence from God: there was a delay. Daniel did not know that, and that is exactly where we stand while we wait.

The account gives a reason straight away: “the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days” (Daniel 10:13). It is a reason that belongs to this text, and it would be unwise to build a mechanism for our own delays out of it. We will not be told as much about ours.

But there is one detail that can be kept without forcing anything. A chapter earlier, the same Daniel was answered that very evening, while he was still praying:

At the beginning of your petitions the commandment went out, and I have come to tell you; for you are greatly beloved

Daniel 9:23 (World English Bible)

Once a few hours, once three weeks. And both times the same words, “greatly beloved”, which chapter 10 repeats in verse 11: “you man greatly beloved”. The quick answer was not a reward, and the slow one was not a penalty. The length of the wait said nothing about how he was heard.

Thanking ahead of time

Solanus Casey kept the door of a Capuchin friary in Detroit for decades. Every day, queues of people came to him with a request, often with a wait: a sick child, a job, some news. His brothers remembered a phrase he kept repeating: “Thank God ahead of time.”

It can be heard the wrong way, as a way of forcing the yes by acting as if it were already settled. That is not what the story of Daniel says, since it promises no outcome. But it can be heard in the light of that story. What is settled from the first day is not the answer you are hoping for. It is that your request was heard. For that, you can give thanks before Thursday.

In the morning, once

One concrete step for the days that are left, borrowed from a morning psalm:

In the morning you shall hear my voice. In the morning I will lay my requests before you, and will watch expectantly.

Psalm 5:3 (World English Bible)

Two gestures, in that order. Lay the request down, then watch. In the morning, say once what you are waiting for, in one sentence, without arguing the case. Then choose one thing to do today that does not depend on the answer: call someone, finish a piece of work, cook a meal for other people. For the rest of the day, when the question comes back, do not say it again. Only remember that it was laid down this morning, and that it was heard.

If the answer, when it lands, is no, the prayer after a rejection begins where this one stops. But until then, the days in between are not a waiting room. They are days.