Toward the end of winter, if you stand at the edge of a field and look across it, everything tells you the same thing. The ground is gray and brown. Nothing is moving. Nothing is growing. If you trusted your eyes alone, you would conclude that the field is finished, that whatever life it once held has gone out of it for good.
But the field knows something your eyes cannot see. Down under the surface, the seeds are doing exactly what seeds do. There is growth already underway, quiet and hidden, weeks before a single green blade breaks the soil. The winter has not denied the harvest. It has only delayed what it is already preparing. And come early spring, that winter death gives way to spring life, and you finally get to see what was happening under the surface the whole time.
I have been thinking about that field because I have been thinking about prayer, and about how often the two feel alike. We pray, and nothing seems to move. We ask, and the sky seems gray and quiet. We are tempted to read the silence as a no, to assume that because we cannot see God working, God must not be working. But the silence of a winter field is not the silence of death. It is the silence of something growing where you cannot watch it.
Jesus told a story about this very thing, and Luke does us an unusual favor with it. Most of the time we have to dig to find the meaning of a parable. Here, Luke tells us the point before he tells us the story. “He told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1, ESV). Then comes the story of a widow and a judge. The judge neither feared God nor respected man. The widow had no standing, no voice, no business being heard at all. So she did the only thing she could do. She kept coming. The judge tried to wave her off and go on with his evening, and she kept coming. Finally he gave her justice, not because he cared, but simply because she would not quit.
It would be easy to misread that story, which is exactly why Luke warned us up front. The judge is not a picture of God. He is the opposite of God. The whole force of the parable runs on contrast. If even a corrupt judge who cares about no one will finally answer a persistent widow, how much more will a good and loving Father answer the children He delights in? Jesus is not telling us to wear God down. He is telling us that our God is nothing like that judge, and that persistence in prayer is not nagging. It is faith.
Three things have stayed with me from this.
The first is that delay is not denial. When God does not jump the moment we thought He would, when the answer does not come on our schedule, we keep praying anyway. The fact that we cannot see Him responding does not mean He has turned His back. It often means the field is still under snow.
The second is that persistent prayer keeps us in His presence. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7, ESV). That is a beautiful promise in English. It is even better in the original language, because the Greek verbs carry continuous action. Keep on asking. Keep on seeking. Keep on knocking. Some of you have prayed the same prayer for years. I want to tell you to keep asking. Persistence is how faith says, “I do not believe in You only because You give me what I want. I believe in You because You are God.”
The third is that God moves on His timeline, not ours. Jesus finishes the story by promising that God will give justice to His elect who cry to Him day and night, and that He will do it speedily (Luke 18:7-8, ESV). Sometimes we read that and think our answer did not feel very fast at all. But we can only see a little of what life is really about. We see the gray field. We do not see the seed. He does.
Prayer was never meant to be a shopping list we hand to God and walk away from. It is communion. It is connection. It is staying with Him when the field looks dead, trusting that He is at work under the surface long before the first green shows.
So keep praying. Keep asking. Keep trusting. The winter field is not as empty as it looks, and neither is the silence.
John W. Crowder is the pastor of First Baptist Church in West, Texas, and the author of Anchor Point: How to Lead with Faith, Find Strength, and Rebuild with Hope After Crisis. He writes here at View from the Vine about faith, life, and leadership. If something here encouraged you, would you share it with someone who needs it today?
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