I Asked Him To Fix It

Four years ago you started asking specifically.

Not vaguely. You asked for a particular thing to change in your marriage, and you asked properly, and you kept asking, and you were not asking for anything unreasonable.

And nothing has happened. Not a refusal, which you could work with. Nothing. The promise you made is still standing and the request you made has gone nowhere, and holding both of those has become the shape of your week.

You have gone on keeping the promise through all four of those years, which nobody has ever mentioned. And somewhere in the last year you stopped hearing the silence as absence of an answer and started hearing it as an answer. A verdict. That God has looked at the request, and looked at the marriage, and declined.

I am going to be careful here because there are two errors available and both of them are common.

The first is to tell you He is about to answer. I do not know that and neither does anybody else, and men have been ruined by preachers who said it anyway.

The second is to tell you the silence means He said no. That is exactly what you have concluded and I do not know that either.

What I can do is take the silence out of the category of message, because it is not one, and that is a mistake with a name.

My presence shall go with thee

There is a moment in Exodus where a man asks for something very large and is given something different and larger, and it is the exchange I want.

And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest (Exodus 33:14, King James Version)

Read the context and it gets sharper. Moses has been asking about the journey, about who goes with them, about the whole enormous problem in front of him.

And the answer he gets is not a plan. It is not a solution to the logistics. It is a person: my presence goes with you.

You are being answered with a presence rather than a repair, and Exodus has never once made those the same request. Exodus 33:14 gives presence where a plan had been asked for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that an answer rather than a deflection.

And notice the second half. And I will give thee rest. Rest before the problem is solved, not after. That is what the presence produces.

You have been offered rest in the middle of an unfixed thing, and no verse has ever once made the fixing the condition of it. The passage attaches the rest to the presence rather than to the outcome, and the Spirit of God is the one who delivers it while the situation is unchanged.

A silence is not a sentence

Now the specific error, and I want to name it plainly because it has been eating you.

Silence is the absence of a message. It is not a message. Those are different things and everything depends on the difference.

When a man does not answer a letter, that can mean a dozen things: he did not receive it, he is thinking, he is unwell, he answered in a way nobody has recognized yet, he means to write in the spring. Only one of the dozen is refusal, and no honest person reads a silence and knows which it is.

You have been holding a quiet and calling it a sentence, and no verse has ever once made a silence into a ruling on a marriage. Exodus 33:14 answers a large question with a presence and a rest rather than with a plan, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a house where nothing has moved for four years.

You are reading one of twelve meanings as though it were the only one, and Exodus has never once made a silence into a refusal. Exodus 33:14 answers a large question with a presence rather than a plan, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a self supplied verdict out of a man's hands.

Four years of nothing got filled with the worst available meaning, and then the filling got treated as though it had come from God.

That is not faith and it is not doubt. It is a man supplying a verdict and then obeying it.

You are obeying a sentence nobody handed down, and a silence has never once been the same thing as a refusal. Exodus 33:14 answers a large question with presence and rest rather than with a plan, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a self supplied verdict out of a man's hands.

You made a promise in front of somebody who has not left the room, and four years of no answer has never once been four years of no presence. It is written that His presence goes with a man and gives him rest, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in a house where nothing has changed.

One sentence, and change what it is

Here is the assignment and there is one instruction in it that will be hard for you.

Say one sentence of prayer out loud about the marriage, in the room where the two of you actually live.

And make it a sentence that is not a request.

The passage supplies presence and rest in place of a solution and never apologizes for it, and the Spirit of God is the one who delivers both while nothing has moved. You are able to say something that is not an ask, and the asking has never once been what kept the line open.

Four years of asking has worn a groove and the groove now runs straight from opening your mouth to making the same request and hearing the same nothing. So change the sentence.

Something like: I have asked for four years and I am not asking today, and I am telling You this marriage belongs to You.

Out loud, when she is not there. Do not follow it with the request. Not this once.

You are able to say something to Him that is not an ask, and it has never once been the asking that kept the line open. Exodus 33:14 supplies presence in place of a plan, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a front room when a man deliberately does not make his request.