I Asked For A Door And Got A Corridor

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes not from the job but from having asked about it for a long time.

Picture the man. He started praying about work about six years ago. Not dramatically. He is not a dramatic man. He would say, most weeks, something like: Lord, if there is another way, show me.

That is a good prayer. It is humble, it is not demanding, and it leaves the outcome open.

And in six years there has been nothing.

Not a closed door, which he could at least read as an answer. Nothing. No opportunity that came and went. No conversation that led anywhere. No sense of being redirected. Just a corridor, with the same doors, all shut, and no indication of anything at either end.

And here is what six years of that does, which is not what people assume.

It does not make him doubt whether God exists. That is not the shape of it at all. What it does is far quieter and more corrosive. He has begun to assign a meaning to the silence, and the meaning he has assigned is about himself.

Somewhere in the fourth year he stopped saying the prayer as often. Not out of anger. Out of a kind of embarrassment. He started to feel like a man asking the same thing repeatedly of somebody who had heard him perfectly well the first time and had made a decision.

And the decision he imagines is not one God has ever announced. He has constructed it out of nothing, out of six years of quiet, and it sounds like: this is what you get.

That construction is the actual damage. Not the corridor. The story he has written about the corridor.

The word is doubled on purpose

There is a psalm that opens with a line so familiar people stop reading it, and the Hebrew underneath it is doing something the English can barely carry.

I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. (Psalm 40:1, King James Version)

In the original, the verb is doubled. Waiting I waited. It is a construction used to intensify, and it signals a very long time.

Which means the man who wrote it was not describing a short season of patience. He was describing a stretch long enough that the doubling was necessary to convey it.

And that psalm is in the book. It was not rejected as a bad testimony. Somebody waited a very long time, said so in a way that emphasized the length, and it became a song for everybody.

You are inside an experience the songbook doubles a word to describe, and Psalm 40 uses an intensified form rather than a brief one (Psalm 40:1), and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept that line in the collection for people in year six.

And notice what he does not do in that verse. He does not explain the delay. He never says why it took as long as it did, and no editor added a footnote.

You have not been given an explanation and are not required to invent one, and Psalm 40:1 records a long wait and offers no reason for its length (Psalm 40:1), and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person from filling that gap with a guess about themselves.

Though it tarry, wait for it

There is a verse in Habakkuk aimed at exactly this, and the prophet had been complaining loudly before it.

For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry. (Habakkuk 2:3)

Though it tarry. God says the word tarry Himself. He does not pretend it will be quick, and He does not tell the prophet that the delay is imaginary.

That is a very unusual kind of honesty. The delay is acknowledged as real by the one who could remove it.

You are not imagining the length of it, and Habakkuk 2 has God using the word tarry rather than denying the delay (Habakkuk 2:3), and it is the Holy Spirit who can hold a person steady inside a delay that has been named as real.

And the psalm goes on, two verses later, to describe what came afterward.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. (Psalm 40:2)

Established my goings. Which is about walking, about ordinary onward movement, rather than about rescue as a single event.

You have a footing being established rather than only an exit being prepared, and Psalm 40:2 talks about goings rather than about arriving somewhere (Psalm 40:2), and the Spirit of God is the one who does that in a corridor rather than only at a door.

What this is not

Let me be plain, because this is the exact place where a message about prayer goes wrong.

This is not saying the silence means yes, or that a door is about to open. Nobody can read a silence, and anybody who tells you what yours means is telling you something they do not know.

It is also not saying he prayed badly or should pray differently. There is no better wording available and the article is not offering one.

And it is not saying that the years of asking were wasted. That is a conclusion, and it is one of the constructions this message exists to interrupt.

And plainly: if the silence has become the kind that makes you feel that nothing will ever be different, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has begun wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a job. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. Getting help is not a failure of faith.

You are not being handed a decoding of anything, and Habakkuk 2 gives an appointed time without giving a date (Habakkuk 2:3), and the Holy Spirit is the one who stays with a person through the part where nothing is explained.