I wasn’t fully aware of what my unanswered prayers had done to me until I went to Gettysburg. Like the metaphorical frog, I’d boiled slowly. Imperceptibly. But standing on Little Round Top, watching the sun set over that sacred ground and picturing the battle waged on it, I understood my battle like never before.
December was a far cry from the oppressive July heat that hung over the Battle of Gettysburg. While they had sweltered in wool uniforms, I walked among the monuments to their memory with numb toes, cold cheeks, and a chill creeping through my scarf. But that didn’t make it any harder to imagine the horrors of those fateful three days.
The incessant thunder of cannons, the smell of gunpowder and death. Endless waves of blue and gray, wounded men screaming in agony, and everyone else screaming war as they ran, exposed and scared but fiercely determined, straight into the enemy’s fire. Shells cratering the earth, little lead balls whizzing past their heads, snagging their coattails, dropping fellow soldiers like swatted flies. Firing into the chaos here, point blank there, anything to prevent one of those balls from dropping them.
How does anyone survive that? How does anyone charge into it in the first place?
I don’t think the average human does. Not with their average human feelings. In general, we’re averse to mass slaughter on both sides of the coin, neither wanting to slaughter nor be slaughtered. But however much those soldiers feared for their lives or recoiled at the thought of taking someone else’s, when it was their turn to charge, that all had to be turned off.
About the time I concluded that’s exactly what they must have done, I realized I’d done it, too. Be it a full-blown civil war or something more personal, sometimes you can’t afford to feel, and I was there.
The Pain of Unanswered Prayers
I live in a prayerful community. Whether it’s a simple heart’s desire or an outright catastrophe, God is a first resort in times of need, as he should be, and I don’t know what line some people have to heaven, but an amazing number of them get through. Miraculous healings of potentially life-changing or even life-ending injuries. Sick people virtually resurrected from their deathbed. The divine arrival of a prayed-for piano. From A to Z, God’s hand has undeniably been at work.
Perhaps my petitions fall under a different alphabet because they’ve always seemed to get a busy signal. God heard the plea of this parent and healed their baby, but I have yet to even hold mine. He heard the cry of that wife and saved her dying husband, but I still don’t even know where mine is.
I’ve certainly never wished a different outcome on those whose lives he’s rained his miracles on. I’m glad their gratitude is not grief instead. Still, their miracles sometimes hit me like a volley of musket fire, and the only way to survive feeling like one of the unlucky minority who’s prayers God doesn’t answer is to flip that switch in my soul. The one that turns off the pain while simultaneously morphing me into a human cactus.
The Unseen Battle
While some people can charge across their battlefield of unanswered prayer with grace and dignity, I mostly just feel like my witchy ninth grade geography teacher who told us we were the bane of her existence. She never married, and I think I’m beginning to understand her like few people did, and maybe like few people understand me now. I haven’t reached her level of crusty–I hope. She was a pro. But if she was as lonely as I’ve so often felt, I can’t blame her.
The thing about turning off is that you think, speak, and act in ways you’d never think, speak, and act if your life was working. If the battle’s obvious, that’s easy to excuse. No one who felt the blasts shake the ground had to wonder why battalions of soldiers were running like maniacs across a field, shooting at people and running them through with bayonets.
But a soldier shooting and screaming at an enemy only he can see, dodging explosions only he can feel? He must be crazy. Yet battles of the heart–or the mind, or the spirit–so often happen exactly that way. I see the fight. Others only see my response to it. So, naturally they might wonder what my problem is. Why is she so withdrawn? Irritable? Unsmiling?
Well, I’ve asked myself the same thing. Have I gone crazy? This isn’t really who I am, is it?
No. It’s not.
The Result of Unanswered Prayers
I’m not an antisocial, moody shadow any more than those Yankees and Rebs were heartless killers. I may look and feel like that, but that’s not me. It’s the war, the armor I’ve put on to survive it. It’s uncomfortable armor, for me and probably for all the people who have to dodge my unwieldy movements in it. But I don’t think God is as concerned with the armor as he is with who’s inside it. And who emerges from it when the battle’s over.
Rewind a couple thousand years to the close of an era of war in the Book of Mormon. Here’s how the Nephites emerged. “But behold, because of the exceedingly great length of the war between the Nephites and the Lamanites many had become hardened…and many were softened because of their afflictions, insomuch that they did humble themselves before God, even in the depth of humility.”
I know how I want to be described at the end of the war. In the war, it’s not always easy to be soft, and even those Nephites who came out of it that way must have had to turn off at times to survive it. But their love for God never turned off, and their afflictions, instead of festering bitterly, became sanctifying.
So, I don’t know how much longer my prayers will go unanswered, and I don’t know what God thinks of my performance on this battlefield so far. From my perspective, it hasn’t been very stellar. But under my clunky armor and human weakness, there’s a heart that wants to be his. It’s a heart that knows he hasn’t been ignoring me, just preparing me. And perhaps when he does answer those prayers and that armor comes off, a more faithful person will come out than went in.
You’re in pretty good shape for the shape you are in.
Dr. Seuss
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