When God Doesn’t Answer

A reflection from Together Church @ St Ann’s

“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle.”
Psalm 56:8 (NLT)

We live among the ruins. In abandoned places where prayers have piled up like rubble, unanswered, whispered, shouted, or left unfinished. The city buzzes with noise, but some of the loudest pain comes from silence. Heaven’s silence.

You know the kind. When you light the candle and sit in the chapel, when you serve the meal and still go home empty,
when you pray with your whole being and feel... nothing.

Its in the quiet where God dwells

In everydfay life, silence isn’t rare, it’s sacred. But it’s also haunting. You pray for healing, and the sickness remains. You ask for peace, and the fight gets louder. You beg for breakthrough, but the door doesn’t budge. And still, we keep praying. Not because we’re certain of the outcome, but because we’re shaped by the waiting.

Unanswered prayer is not failure. It’s formational. We often come to prayer hoping for control. But God meets us with surrender. He invites us to keep showing up, to the church, to the table, to the margins. To believe that even when we don’t get what we want, we’re getting more of Him.

Jesus Himself prayed in Gethsemane, “Take this cup from me.” And yet the cup remained. Because some prayers shape us more by the silence than by the yes.

On this journey, I no longer pray to be rescued from the fire, I pray for the courage to remain in it. Unanswered prayers taught me the rhythm of trust: inhale the ache, exhale the surrender. I pray not to escape the towns, but to see it with God’s eyes.

This Is Our Sacred Work

To light a candle when the night feels long. To pass the bread even when your own heart hungers. To speak blessings over a world that’s still breaking.

This is the work of a Together Church. This is the rhythm of Cook. Serve. Pray. We don’t pray to bend God to our will. We pray to bend our will to God’s love.

Invitation to the Table

If your prayer has gone unanswered, you are not forgotten. If the silence has scared you, you are not alone. If you’ve stopped praying, it’s not too late to begin again.

This week, return to your candle. Return to the table. Return to the quiet. Write your unanswered prayer in a journal.
Bring it to your next shared meal. Pray it again, not to be heard louder, but to be shaped deeper.

Unanswered doesn’t mean unseen.
He has collected every tear in His bottle. And He meets you right there, in the silence, on the streets, at the table.

Urban Monastic Reflections | Together Church @ St Anns, Cappoquin
Where the sacred hides in silence, service, and one another.