Feeling Forgotten

"Hannah prayed to the LORD and wept many tears…if you…take notice of your servant’s affliction, remember and not forget me…I am a woman with a broken heart…I’ve been praying from the depth of my anguish and resentment.” 1 Samuel 1:11, 15

My grandmother recorded in her journal every day for over 62 years which included family experiences, Scripture, commitments and prayers. I still have those journals that chronicle a life where God continuously remembered her and never forgot her. Volume upon volume she begged to and boasted of her Father through heartbreaking times and joyful times. There are anguished sentences of ink that are scribbled on those pages, some ink smeared by her tears no doubt. I remember one entry in particular which resonates with me this morning while I was praying about something for the millionth time. She wrote, ‘That Saturday, as I was trying to cook the noon meal, tears were streaming down my face and splashing wherever there was a catching place. After the meal was over and the kitchen was cleaned, I went into the back bedroom and got down on my knees— but not to pray, I went to cry. I had prayed all the prayers I knew for Mother’s healing over and over again. I had begged God, agonized, and claimed all the promises of healing that I knew. The healing had not come. I was kneeling and weeping, but there were no words. After a while and through my sobbing I heard with the “ears of my spirit” a sweet Voice, saying, “You don’t have faith enough for this, but I have, my faith will never fail, and it will encircle your faith, so yours will not fail.” In that moment His faith quickened mine so that I could believe, and I see the secret of faith. I arose from my knees and left the back bedroom a different way from which I had entered. I now understood that there comes a point in intercession where words are left behind. Where the person himself becomes the prayer he is making, and words as such are unnecessary. I found this well in a desert time of my life, and today I still draw strength from those living waters. It is the reason I can spiritually “run without being weary and walk without fainting.” Pilgrimage to the Promised Land, Gipsie Miller, p. 72

I am currently 12 years deep in waiting on a promise to be fulfilled, and 2 ½ years deep on another one. One is extremely emotional for me while the other is very important for our future. I feel I have prayed all the prayers, claimed all the promises, stood on complete faith but still the promises are unrealized. Hannah and Grandmother’s anguished pleas strike a chord deep in my heart this morning. Their raw emotional requests of God seem too familiar. How my heart breaks for them…for me…and for you. Our lives hauntingly echo their lives when we have prayed for years to receive something…our pleas hauntingly echo their pleas of ‘remember and not forget me.’

It is easy to feel like God has forgotten us when the years tick off the calendar and our promises are still in theory, not in reality. We must be like Hannah and Grandmother who fully understood that God doesn’t tire from our prayers but invites them. Not only have we not been forgotten, but He has equipped us for this journey. It is through these pleas that His faith encircles our faith and carries us until the design of the promise has been fully conceived. God hasn’t forgotten your loved ones…He hasn’t forgotten your broken marriage…He remembers that you need that job…want that partner…desire that final outcome. When we can’t speak the words anymore we have the Guide who lifts our words for us. We can rest in that truth that even when there are no new words to lift the Holy Spirit never runs out of words.

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.” Romans 8:26