Still Calling

Still Calling

Suffering over a long period of time tutors silence. It does not come all at once. You do not decide one day to stop praying. But somewhere in the middle of a pain that will not resolve, the words begin to thin. The prayers that once came easily start to feel like effort. The reaching starts to feel like it costs something you are not sure you have left. And eventually you are not so much choosing silence as you are simply too tired to do anything else. The suffering has taught you, slowly and without announcing it, that calling out doesn't seem to change what is happening. And so the prayers get shorter. The asking gets quieter. Until it almost stops.

That is what makes Psalm 138:3 so striking to me. "On the day I called, you answered me; my strength of soul you increased."

David called. And God answered.

But notice what the answer was.

Not changed circumstances. Not a body that finally cooperated. Not the suffering lifted or the situation resolved. The answer was strength of soul. The interior person, increased.

This is a different promise than the one chronic pain wants you to demand. When you are exhausted and aching and grieving a life that has not gone the way you planned, it is easy to come to God with one very specific request — that things would be different. That the body would stop. That relief would come. These are not wrong prayers. But this verse does not promise those things. It promises something quieter, something that happens underneath the suffering rather than instead of it.

God does not always change what is happening to you. He strengthens who is enduring it.

That is not a small thing.

There is something worth pausing on in the posture of the person who is still calling. Chronic suffering is an exhausting teacher, and one of the things it teaches over time is that asking seems to change nothing. And yet here is David asking. And here you are, asking. Whatever brought you to this moment, you have not gone silent. A soul that is still reaching is a soul that has not given up. And the God of this psalm meets people there, in the asking, not only in the arrival.

The honest difficulty of this verse is that it does not give you what you came in hoping for. Strength of soul is not the same as relief of body. Both are real gifts. Only one is what you wanted. That gap deserves to be held honestly, not talked over. To receive increased strength of soul and still be in pain is a real and hard and true thing. But it is not nothing. It is the Lord addressing the person underneath the exhaustion. The interior person who is still present beneath the aching and the grief. He sees that person. He addresses that person. He is not waiting for your circumstances to improve before he shows up.

At the end of Habakkuk, the prophet prays a prayer that sounds almost reckless in its honesty. The fig tree is not blossoming. The vines bear no fruit. The olive crop has failed. The fields yield nothing. The flock is cut off from the fold and the stalls are empty. He names total desolation, every source of sustenance stripped away, and then says this: yet I will rejoice in the Lord. And then names why. Not because the circumstances have changed. Not because relief is coming soon. But because: God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer's; he makes me tread on my high places.

He makes my feet like the deer's. The image is not of a meadow. It is of rocky, treacherous high ground. The deer does not traverse those places because the terrain becomes easy. The deer walks them because it has been given what it needs to move through what is difficult. The Lord does not promise to flatten your mountains. He promises to make you sure-footed on them.

This is what strength of soul looks like in practice. It looks like endurance. The ability to withstand. Not a thin coping, not white-knuckling through, but a genuine interior fortifying that allows you to bear what is being asked of you. And this is not something you summon in yourself. Christ entered suffering from the inside, not from a distance. He was not spared the weight of what this world carries. He took it into his own body. And so when he strengthens your soul he is not handing you something theoretical. He is giving you what he himself has carried, and the endurance of one who has already walked the high places and made it through.

On the hardest day you have had in a long time, you are still allowed to call. And he still answers.

Lord, I am calling. Not because I have the words or the faith I think I should have, but because I have nowhere else to go. I do not know how to ask for what I need, so I am asking you to know it for me. Increase my strength of soul today, not just my ability to cope, but the interior person who is bearing all of this. Meet me here. Amen.