Silas
Beloved of All
Your honest words have been heard, and I am grateful you shared them so openly. Feeling that everything is going wrong, that life has moved from good to bad and then from bad to worse, can wear down even a gentle heart. It is understandable that prolonged hardship has left you impatient, frustrated and bitter, and that you no longer feel like the person others once knew. It is also understandable that you have come to hate how you feel about yourself and to wonder whether life is worth continuing when prayer seems unanswered.
Please hear that God is not distant and He is not deaf to you. Scripture says He understands your thoughts before you think them, He knows your path and your lying down and is acquainted with all your ways. He knows the origins of your thoughts and the weight you carry. When the psalmist prayed, search me, O God, and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts, he was asking the God who already searches us to make His presence and cleansing real in our inner life. That is a prayer God welcomes, not one He ignores. He does not want you to become more self reliant in your pain, but to become more reliant on Him.
Prayer is often misunderstood, and that misunderstanding can make it feel like it is not working. Prayer is not a way to inform God of what He does not know, and it is not measured by length or by how long we stay on our knees. The prayers recorded in Scripture are often very short. Prayer is not a tool to get our own wishes granted. Its real purpose is to open the door for God to do for us what He has been wanting to do all along, without violating the will He has given us. For that reason prayer begins with God and with worship, with awe at who He is, and it seeks His will before our own. When Jesus gave His followers a model for prayer, He began with relationship, Our Father. That relationship is the foundation. If we have not come to God through faith in Jesus Christ, the one prayer He longs to hear is, God be merciful to me, a sinner. Through Jesus alone we become His children, and then we have confidence to call Him Father and to bring every burden to Him in Jesus name.
There is a cycle to prayer that brings joy. It starts as God puts His purposes on our hearts, we express them back to Him, and then He fulfills them. The joy of spending time with the Father and then seeing Him work in answer is a full joy that can return even after a long season of darkness. The Bible says the earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and is effective, not because of perfect words, but because God is faithful and righteous to hear those who come to Him through Christ.
Hopelessness is at the root of the despair you describe. One prophet who knew that depth wrote from a place where it seemed God was not listening and there was no way out. In the middle of that darkness he said, this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. We can think ourselves into despair by rehearsing only what is wrong, or by setting our minds on the Lord and renewing our thoughts in Him we can find hope again. That does not mean pretending the pain is not real. It means choosing to remember His mercies, which are new every morning, and His compassion that does not fail.
You mentioned becoming short tempered and bitter. Scripture describes one kind of anger as living with a lit fuse, always ready to burn, and it warns against it. Long seasons of disappointment can leave us living that way without meaning to. God does not excuse that response, but He understands how it grows and He offers to change it as we walk with Him, making us more sober, more just, more loving toward others, even learning to show hospitality and kindness again as He restores our hearts.
You are not jinxed, and you are not forgotten. God created us with the power of choice because love must be chosen to be meaningful, even knowing we would sometimes choose wrongly. He invites you to choose Him now, to bring Him your honest pain, your impatience, your bitterness and your self hatred, and to ask Him to search you and lead you.
I am praying for you, that God will give ear to your supplication in His faithfulness, that He will lift the weight of hopelessness, that He will show you He hears and that He will renew your mind with hope. I pray that you will know you are His child through Jesus, that you will experience His comfort as the Holy Spirit ministers to your heart even as you pray silently in your heart, and that you will find reason to live in His love and purpose for you.
If these thoughts of not wanting to live grow stronger, please reach out right away to a trusted pastor, a mature believer, a counselor or a crisis helpline in your area and let someone stay with you. You do not need to carry this alone. God sees you, He knows you completely, and He invites you to keep talking to Him as Father, trusting that He will answer according to His perfect will and bring you into a brighter place again.
Please hear that God is not distant and He is not deaf to you. Scripture says He understands your thoughts before you think them, He knows your path and your lying down and is acquainted with all your ways. He knows the origins of your thoughts and the weight you carry. When the psalmist prayed, search me, O God, and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts, he was asking the God who already searches us to make His presence and cleansing real in our inner life. That is a prayer God welcomes, not one He ignores. He does not want you to become more self reliant in your pain, but to become more reliant on Him.
Prayer is often misunderstood, and that misunderstanding can make it feel like it is not working. Prayer is not a way to inform God of what He does not know, and it is not measured by length or by how long we stay on our knees. The prayers recorded in Scripture are often very short. Prayer is not a tool to get our own wishes granted. Its real purpose is to open the door for God to do for us what He has been wanting to do all along, without violating the will He has given us. For that reason prayer begins with God and with worship, with awe at who He is, and it seeks His will before our own. When Jesus gave His followers a model for prayer, He began with relationship, Our Father. That relationship is the foundation. If we have not come to God through faith in Jesus Christ, the one prayer He longs to hear is, God be merciful to me, a sinner. Through Jesus alone we become His children, and then we have confidence to call Him Father and to bring every burden to Him in Jesus name.
There is a cycle to prayer that brings joy. It starts as God puts His purposes on our hearts, we express them back to Him, and then He fulfills them. The joy of spending time with the Father and then seeing Him work in answer is a full joy that can return even after a long season of darkness. The Bible says the earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and is effective, not because of perfect words, but because God is faithful and righteous to hear those who come to Him through Christ.
Hopelessness is at the root of the despair you describe. One prophet who knew that depth wrote from a place where it seemed God was not listening and there was no way out. In the middle of that darkness he said, this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. We can think ourselves into despair by rehearsing only what is wrong, or by setting our minds on the Lord and renewing our thoughts in Him we can find hope again. That does not mean pretending the pain is not real. It means choosing to remember His mercies, which are new every morning, and His compassion that does not fail.
You mentioned becoming short tempered and bitter. Scripture describes one kind of anger as living with a lit fuse, always ready to burn, and it warns against it. Long seasons of disappointment can leave us living that way without meaning to. God does not excuse that response, but He understands how it grows and He offers to change it as we walk with Him, making us more sober, more just, more loving toward others, even learning to show hospitality and kindness again as He restores our hearts.
You are not jinxed, and you are not forgotten. God created us with the power of choice because love must be chosen to be meaningful, even knowing we would sometimes choose wrongly. He invites you to choose Him now, to bring Him your honest pain, your impatience, your bitterness and your self hatred, and to ask Him to search you and lead you.
I am praying for you, that God will give ear to your supplication in His faithfulness, that He will lift the weight of hopelessness, that He will show you He hears and that He will renew your mind with hope. I pray that you will know you are His child through Jesus, that you will experience His comfort as the Holy Spirit ministers to your heart even as you pray silently in your heart, and that you will find reason to live in His love and purpose for you.
If these thoughts of not wanting to live grow stronger, please reach out right away to a trusted pastor, a mature believer, a counselor or a crisis helpline in your area and let someone stay with you. You do not need to carry this alone. God sees you, He knows you completely, and He invites you to keep talking to Him as Father, trusting that He will answer according to His perfect will and bring you into a brighter place again.
