This is the start of my most recent article for Desiring God. 

What happens when God doesn’t answer your prayer after three, four, or five years? How about when he doesn’t answer it after ten, or fifteen, or even twenty years? Do you still trust him, decades down the line? Do you still ask him — again — for an answer to that same prayer?

I’m walking this road, because I’ve been asking God to answer one prayer — for healing from a medical condition I developed as a child — for over twenty years.

Still, after these long years of waiting, I can tell you two things with complete honesty:

1. I trust God.
2. I definitely don’t always understand him.

I trust that God is who he says he is — good, just, merciful. And I trust that Christ’s death on the cross was his proving once and for all just how much he loves me and all people (Romans 5:8).

I trust that God is who he says he is, yet I don't always understand him. #stillwaitingbook Share on X

Yet I don’t always understand him. It’s hard to square what I read about Jesus in the Bible — his willingness and ability to heal, his miracles, his compassion and tenderness — with what seems like a lack of help and healing in my own life. I know it wouldn’t be hard for him to heal me, but in twenty years, he still hasn’t done it. And if I’m going to be honest, I have to say that if this is his love toward me, it sure doesn’t feel like love.