Last night I had a moment where I felt that God was not listening to me or maybe he doesn’t really understand me because I’ve been asking for the same things for too long and for some reason I’m still not getting them. For some reason, he wants to keep me waiting. For some reason, he keeps making the lessons harder.

At first, I thought maybe I didn’t articulate what I wanted accurately. I looked up prayers and talked to him in different languages and asked him for what I wanted in many different ways because I thought that if I was able to perfect my words and my prayers, it will make a difference. Like maybe he’d pay more attention if I had the right words to say.

I thought that if I found the perfect prayer, God won’t say no. But then I realized God knows what’s in your heart whether you say it or not. God knows what you want without you saying a word. God doesn’t need reminders. God doesn’t forget.

He didn’t forget about what you wished for last year or ten years ago. He didn’t forget about your prayers. He didn’t forget about the nights you cried to him because you didn’t have anyone else. He knows what’s in your heart.

The truth is, God will not always give you what you ask for no matter how hard you pray or what kind of prayer you use. He won’t always make things easy for you. He won’t give you things just because you’re nagging or begging. Because he knows what’s truly in your heart, he knows what’s best for you. He knows what your heart needs not what your heart wants. He knows what will heal your heart forever not temporarily. He knows what will soften your heart. He knows your heart more than you do. God wants you to know that, at the end of the day, your heart is in his hands. It belongs to him.

So you can beat around the bush, pretend like he doesn’t already know, read all the prayers you can find but it won’t change his mind. It won’t alter his plan. It won’t persuade him that your plan is better. Maybe God doesn’t want you to say everything out loud, maybe he just wants you to have faith in his silence. In the moments when you feel like he’s absent. In the days when you can’t get out of bed because life doesn’t make sense. In the nights when you can’t sleep because your heart is heavy. In the weeks or months when you feel dead inside because you can’t remember the last something made you feel alive.

Maybe it’s not so much about what we tell God but more about what he’s trying to tell us. Maybe we’re too busy talking and telling him what we need that we forget to step back and listen to his answers, watch how our lives unfold and look for the signs he’s sending us.

Maybe we find God more in silence, when we don’t know what to say, when we can’t express how we feel, when the world just ceases to make sense, that’s when we feel most connected to him. When we trust him to heal our hearts because we know for sure that if we leave it up to him, he won’t break our hearts.