In many homes with small children, there’s a drawer or closet shelf holding clothes nobody can wear yet. It might be a winter coat bought on clearance in April, shoes two sizes ahead, or shirts with the tags still attached. The child has no idea any of it exists. The child is thinking about lunch, or the cup that is the wrong color, or whatever feels urgent in the next five minutes, while someone who loves them has already been shopping for the person they’re growing into.
A lot of grown people are asking for things right now without much sense that anyone is listening. Prices keep shifting, the news keeps getting louder, and many of us carry a private list of what has to come through: a job, a test result, a marriage, a child who stopped calling. Some of us pray over that list, and some of us stopped when the silence began to feel like an answer.
Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells the crowd to ask, seek, and knock. Then he brings them to a kitchen table. What parent would hand a hungry child a stone when the child asks for bread? “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him?” (Matthew 7:11, NASB).
The clothes on the shelf are one way I picture that care. But the picture has a limit. It would be comforting to say that every unanswered prayer is folded away somewhere, waiting for us to grow into it. The passage doesn’t say that. Anyone who has prayed for someone to live and then stood at a graveside knows how hard that promise would land. Jesus says the Father gives what is good. He doesn’t ask us to explain the empty spaces on God’s behalf.
A child doesn’t have to know what is on the top shelf before asking for lunch. And Jesus doesn’t tell us to wait until we can account for every answer before we ask again. He leaves the invitation open, even for those of us who have asked before and are still carrying the question.
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