even when

My friend and I, we walk, and I tell her about Riley’s last seizure, the words tumbling from my mouth in a rush. The story’s only hours old; it happened the night before, so this is how I’m doing.

My friend listens intently, nodding a little in encouragement when I look at her, gasping in all the right places. I tell my friend about how Riley lost speech first, like a cruel throwback, how she blinked and breathed but couldn’t answer me, about the convulsions I thought might make her choke. I tell my friend about the torturous recovery after, when Riley silently blinked and held her boyfriend’s hand and looked blankly around the table searching for words, how when she could talk again, she’d forgotten her own name and ours. Those minutes passed slowly, like thawing water just beginning to drip. Feeling helpless, I’d asked Kevin to pray. That word–helpless–had curled around my throat.

I asked for prayer, because I know I’m not helpless. The request felt like wrapping my fingers around that suffocating lie and slinging it off. But such things wait for a more opportune time.

I finish telling my friend and fall silent, listening to the smack of our shoes against the street.

“That’s not what I prayed for,” my friend says after a moment. She looks irritated, but her tone is still.

“Me either,” I say, remembering. I had helped Riley to bed that night, wiping her tears away with my thumbs while she grieved these seizures. I had listened as she prayed, honest and raw. I had asked again myself–again and again and again–for healing for her in this life. And it had come again as a surprise, that word–helpless; hulking in just as I clicked off the twinkle lights over Riley’s bed. Darkly, I had wondered if God hears me at all. I had stared at the thing, acknowledging for a moment the depth of my disappointment, letting myself feel the rough, carved edges of pain, and then I closed my eyes.

Have faith. I can lament without losing faith. Jesus said that His Spirit would remind us of everything He has said (John 14:26), and in that moment I thought of Asaph, demanding that God not stand aloof (Psalm 83:1). I thought of Jesus quoting David, “Why are you so far from my cries of anguish (Psalm 22:1)?” And I remembered Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, threatened by the fire. God can, they’d said, but even if he does not (Daniel 3:17-18), we won’t adulterate our worship.

I can struggle with God’s answers to my prayers without drawing borders around my trust, without believing only conditionally upon the understanding that God does things my way. I closed my eyes and remembered Job, the way the enemy claimed Job’s faith wasn’t faith at all but a myth based only on the blessings Job could see and feel and touch. Job raged and wrestled and argued and grieved, but he did it demanding an audience with God because his faith was real. “When I was in distress, I sought the Lord,” Asaph also wrote, “at night I stretched out untiring hands, and I would not be comforted (Psalm 77:2).” Remembering all this, I had knelt there by Riley’s bed, and I had told God how much this hurts, and I had slashed through the lie with Truth.

I look at my friend now, watch her hair swing as she walks. “But I have to trust God, even when He says no…or not yet,” I say to her, continuing.

“Yes,” she says, in a smoldering, firm-standing tone, meeting my gaze. “Even when his answers tick us off.” These last words of hers fall hard, like she’s throwing them down against the road as we walk on, and I smile. I love her honesty.