You have been waiting now a long month, and the door has not opened. The silence from that quarter is like the stillness before a storm, and it presses hard upon you. I do not wonder that your heart sinks a little. The electric shocks you suffered in your own dwelling, the very place a man counts safe, must have left you jarred in body and spirit. And then the ailments, the unexpected costs, the threats and contempt, these are not light things. They are real wounds, and the Lord who made you knows every sting of them.
But there is a truth I want you to hold, as a child holds his father’s hand in a dark lane. Every house on this earth is only let out to tenants. The lease is never freehold. The true Landlord is God. He keeps the title deeds of breath and bone and brick. Your own body is His property, every nerve that felt that shock was knitted by His skill. And that man who ought to compensate you is, whether he knows it or not, a fellow‑tenant under the same great Owner. The Lord sees when one tenant wrongs another. He keeps a strict account. Not one unjust word, not one shilling kept back by hardness, will slip His notice. The rust of those coins will witness against him in the day when the Landlord rises up to settle all things. So rest in this: the cause is not forgotten. The judgment seat is not an empty scaffold.
Yet I would not have you fix your eyes too long on that man. Look higher. While you wait for human recompense, remember the astonishing compensation that has already been paid into your soul. Christ died for you while you were yet a sinner. That is the mighty deed that commends God’s love. He did not wait for you to make good. He did not demand a settlement from your hand. He bore the shock of divine justice in your stead, and the great wound of sin was healed by His stripes. If He has given you Himself, can He not be trusted with these smaller things? He who paid your debt of eternal suffering will not stand idly by when a few pounds or a skin complaint weight you down. He feels the wrong because He has taken you into union with Himself. You are a member of His body, and He keeps a jealous eye on His own flesh.
I know the prayer you have prayed, that the landlord’s conscience would be stirred, that the Holy Spirit would awaken him to repent and make right. That is a prayer after the heart of Jesus, who prayed for those who nailed Him to the cross. And sometimes such prayers are answered in the very moment when everything seems most still. The Spirit works best in the deep, where no ripple tells of His moving. This month of silence may be the plough tearing up the fallow ground, ready for the seed. Or it may be, as with David’s brothers, that the man’s heart is set against you because your ways are not his ways. David was overlooked and despised in his own father’s house, yet the Lord had fixed His choice on him. Men saw a shepherd boy; God saw a king. So it may be that your present lowliness, your seeming weakness, is the very condition in which Christ is preparing to honor you. The Spirit does this work: He empties us, that Christ may fill us; He lays us low, that the Savior alone may be exalted. Your helplessness is not a sign of God’s displeasure; it is the workshop of His power.
Let me put it like this. There is a story of a great Queen who came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon. She would not have come if she had not believed the report. But you have a greater than Solomon. You have Jesus, who invites you to sit at His table, not as a servant but as a companion. He has spread a feast of comforts in the upper room of His promises, and He says, “Whatever things you ask in prayer, believe that you receive them, and you shall have them.” Come to that table now. Tell Him the whole list of your grievances, the shocks, the illness, the shower passes, the threats, and then leave them there. He does not tire of hearing a well‑pleaded case. And when you rise from that sacred meal, you will find your heart steadied, even before the outward answer comes. The open door of prayer is set before you, and no landlord, no threat, no delay can shut it.
The Lord, the righteous Landlord, will do right. His compassions do not fail. You have kept His word and not denied His name in this trial; now trust Him to keep you in the hour of temptation that presses on your soul. The morning will break. The compensation will come, either from the hand that took your peace or from the hand that gave His Son. But come it will. Let your heart rest in that.
Let us pray. O Lord, You see this child of Yours, tried in body and spirit, waiting upon You. You mark every wrong that has been done, every cost that has been borne. Awaken, we beseech You, the conscience of the one who has caused these things. Turn his heart to make restitution, as Zacchaeus did, and give him no rest until he has done justly. But more than this, draw very near to this dear soul. Be their shelter when men are harsh, their healing when the skin remembers its wounds, their purse when expenses rise. Above all, give them such a sense of Your own nearness that the sting of injustice melts away in the warmth of Your love. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives to intercede, Amen.
Prayer Focus: God, Thank You for loving me. Thank You for loving me, Jesus. God, I ask You in Jesus’ name please bless me with everything that I stand in need of and everything You want me to have. 
