What Faith Looks Like When It's Not Pretty
I prayed for the same thing for a year, then quit right before it worked.
I prayed for the same thing for a year, then quit right before it worked.
There was a version of this prayer I could’ve said in my sleep. Almost a year of nights, same words, asking God to get me ready for my husband. I knew it cold.
Then one night I didn’t say it. The next night I didn’t either, and I noticed I felt relieved, which is a strange thing to feel about giving up on someone you haven’t met yet.
That’s the part of faith I never hear anyone cop to. Sometimes it isn’t belief that keeps you praying. It’s habit. And when the habit finally breaks, you find out how little belief was actually holding it up.
I should back up, because the prayer itself is the whole point. I wasn’t asking God to bring him. I didn’t ask for a sign, a name, a face across a room. I asked God to keep preparing me. To have me ready when His timing was right, and to make it all click then instead of now. Which is a very mature thing to pray while secretly meaning now. (I meant now. I always meant now.) I’d say it at night, or in the middle of some event I wished I had a person to share it with, politely requesting a patience I did not actually want granted.
For a while it didn’t feel like anything. No chills, no clarity, no sense that anything on the other end was receiving. I said what I needed to say, I sat there, then went on with my day like I’d just replied to a text. I used to think that meant I was doing it wrong.
The thing about faith is that most of it looks exactly like that. Not the mountaintop. Not the testimony you cry through. Just the same sentence, most nights, into a quiet that doesn’t answer back.
The version we get sold is a highlight reel. Someone prayed, and then the job came. Someone believed, and then the diagnosis reversed. Someone trusted, and the door opened. I love those stories. I’ve written one of them. They’re the returns, though. We rarely highlight the years of contributions.
So around month ten, I quit.
Not dramatically. I just decided it wasn’t going to happen for me and started rearranging my life around that. I’ll be the fun aunt. Eventually the rich aunt. I doubted myself, and I’ll say the part you’re not supposed to say in a faith essay: I doubted God. I didn’t just lose the feeling. I gave up the wanting. I called it being realistic. It was really just being tired of asking for something that never came.
Here’s the question I keep circling. If I stopped feeling it, stopped believing it, and gave up on the whole thing, was any of that year even faith?
I’ve decided it was, and that the ugly, given-up middle is the only part that counts.
Feelings are the least reliable input I have. I’ve felt certain about people who left, felt called toward things that went nowhere, felt nothing in rooms where I now know something was happening. If I only counted the times I felt it, I’d have almost nothing on the books.
Doubt gets treated like a defect, the thing you confess and repent for. I’ve never met a person with real faith who didn’t have real doubt underneath it. The ones who scare me are the ones with no questions. That’s not conviction. That’s a position nobody’s ever stress-tested.
It got answered. Just not the way I was refreshing for. It turned out to be someone who’d been my friend for years, someone I never saw coming, because I was too busy scanning the horizon for a stranger. It didn’t click until I’d stopped waiting and started doing the work on me. The mirror stuff. The unglamorous, nobody-claps-for-it work of getting my own heart ready.
Which is when I finally caught the thing I’d been too annoyed to see.
The way you pray decides where you look. If I’d prayed bring me my husband, I’d have spent that whole year as a scanner, auditing every man in every room for the part, treating my life like a casting call. Instead I prayed prepare me, and without meaning to, that pointed the search inward. I wasn’t hunting for him. I was working on the parts of me that would’ve made me hard to build a life with. My habits. My fear. The stuff I’d have brought into it and blamed on him later.
The work did something I didn’t see coming. It taught me to tell the difference between a voice worth listening to and noise. “Sydney doesn’t know how to date.” “Her standards are too high.” That one usually came from people who called themselves friends. Then the other genre, from the guys: “I can give you whatever you want.” “I have a nice car.” I knew every one was a lie, and not because I was being stubborn. The praying had gotten me to actually know myself. You can’t sell someone a story about who they are once they’ve done the work of finding out firsthand. The standards weren’t too high. They were finally accurate.
The trickiest noise, though, wasn’t coming from them. It was coming from me.
When you want something badly enough, you start begging God for signs, and a sign is really just a demand with better manners. Show me. Point him out. Confirm it so I can stop wondering. But a standing order for signs is the easiest way to talk yourself down the wrong road. You start reading meaning into everything, and not all of it is a God thing. Some of it is just you, wanting, dressed up as guidance. (The enemy doesn’t need much. He mostly needs you impatient.) Tuning out the friends and the guys with the nice cars turned out to be the same skill as learning to stop demanding signs. Both are just noise. The work is what let me hear past all of it.
Praying to be prepared doesn’t hand you a map. It points your soul in the direction it was built to go, then lets you walk without a running list of signs to misread. When you finally land where you were made to be, you don’t need it confirmed. You can feel it. Your soul goes quiet in the good way.
I thought I was praying for patience. I was actually praying for a redirect.
The quiet year wasn’t God saying no. It was God doing exactly what I asked, and me calling it nothing.
Here’s the part I didn’t expect. The man I ended up with, Dylan, isn’t just someone I can live with. He’s a better partner to me than anyone I would’ve cast back in scanner mode, when I was shopping for a type. I can only see that because of the work. The version of me from month ten would’ve looked right past him. Or worse, gotten him and not known what she had, because she hadn’t built the thing that lets you love a person in the specific way they actually need. You don’t get handed that. You build it before they show up, usually without realizing that’s what you’re doing.
That’s what searching can’t give you. Searching can find you a person. It can’t make you into someone who knows what to do with one. When you’re where God made you to be, with the person He made you for, your soul is at peace in a way that has nothing to do with butterflies. It’s quieter than that. I wouldn’t have recognized the feeling if I’d spent that year hunting, because I’d have been too busy looking to notice I’d already arrived.
The prayer worked. I just didn’t recognize it, because the answer showed up as preparation instead of arrival, and nobody sends a notification for that.
I still say some version of it most nights. Same quiet, most of the time.
I just don’t assume the quiet means nothing anymore.
♡ Syd