Prayer: What Silence Did to Me

David didn’t learn to pray on a throne. He learned it in a cave. Cold stone, silence, nothing but his own breath coming back at him.

My cave has taken a lot of forms. It was the cell where I spent four years, where the silence pressed in and every day sat heavier than the one before it. And even after prison, life has felt like one cave after another. Different walls, same echo. Every one of them has made me sit with what I actually believe about God, about people, and about myself.

I used to love prayer. I’d kneel and talk to God like He was right there in the room. It wasn’t ritual. It was a conversation, and I felt close to Him, heard and known in a way that was steady. Then after prison something in me cracked. I came to believe that God answers prayers through people, and for a while it looked like that was exactly what was happening. Lawyers came into my life who saw me as a person instead of a headline. They understood the injustice. They had the skill and the connections to change everything. We made real plans. There was real hope. I remember thinking, this is it, this is God finally moving. Then life moved on without me. They got busy. Priorities shifted. Good intentions faded into silence. You can only get that close to the thing that would change your life so many times before something inside you starts to give.

Then another cave opened. About four years ago I fell hard for someone I thought I’d marry. We loved the same wild things, motorcycles and marathons and a faith that felt alive between us. We prayed about our future together. We both felt peace about it. It felt aligned and real. But agency is real too. Outside voices got in. Doubt grew. Fear won. She stepped back. Nothing dramatic changed except her decision, and that decision changed everything for me. That’s when it really landed that I can’t control how people respond, even when I’m sure God is moving. When the answer to a prayer runs through somebody else’s will, prayer starts to feel fragile.

And prayer isn’t casual for me. It’s intimate. It’s supposed to be a child talking to his Father. That word, Father, is sacred to me. It means duty and presence and sacrifice. A father earns the title by showing up, by protecting and staying. It isn’t a biological label. It’s a responsibility you live out over years. I don’t even let myself claim it anymore. I lost it a long time ago. But my own father, Donald Pedersen, was the real thing. He was the one I could go to no matter what. I knew he’d support me, defend me, move mountains if he had to. That’s what the word means to me.

So when someone asks me to pray to a Heavenly Father, that intimate language is hard to reach for. I know the doctrine. I know I’m a son of God. But the closeness I had with my dad doesn’t transfer to heaven as easily as I wish it did. Without it, my cave feels different from the one I picture when I read David’s prayers. Even scared and alone, he could still reach toward God.

Most days I can barely reach at all.

The silence feels colder without that connection. The echoes go deeper. The space feels wider.

The truth is I rarely pray now. At dinner with my wife I say the simple, safe words. Bless the food. Keep us alive. Nothing that costs me anything. I still want what I used to have. I miss it. But opening myself back up to that, and risking more silence or another answer that gets close and then collapses, feels heavier than just staying guarded.

So that’s where I am. Not resolved, not restored, just here, in the cave, without the closeness David carried and without pretending I still have it. The silence is real. The loneliness is real. And the echoes are mine.

Part of what made that silence hurt so much was a bargain I didn’t know I’d made. I’d believed that if I prayed sincerely, closeness would follow. That faithfulness would come with direction. That if I kept reaching, sooner or later something would reach back. When it didn’t go that way, I wasn’t only grieving the silence. I was grieving the deal I thought faith had promised me.

No Transaction

We grow up believing life is a trade.

You study, you get the grades. You work hard, you get paid. You’re kind, people are kind back. You pray, you get peace. Do this, get that.

School teaches it. Bosses reward it. Church language wraps it in holy words way too often. And we buy it because it feels fair, because it makes the world feel like it adds up.

It doesn’t. There’s no transaction.

No Transaction: David Chose

David didn’t reduce faith to a deal.

When the prophet came looking, David wasn’t even in the room. His father lined up seven brothers first. David was still out with the sheep, forgotten in the field. The shepherd. The overlooked one. The kid nobody thought to call in.

Then Goliath stood out there screaming, and David stepped forward. Not because a crown was on the table. Because somebody had to.

He served Saul after that. Played music to settle a tormented king, fought his battles, bled for him. And when Saul turned on him and the spears started flying, David didn’t pull out a receipt and demand what he was owed.

He ran. Caves, dust, hunger, the kind of nights where you can hear your own breathing come off the stone.

Twice he had Saul dead to rights. Twice he had a reason. Twice he had men standing right there who would’ve cheered him on. He didn’t do it. Not because staying his hand would earn him anything, but because doing it would’ve cost him himself.

And when the suffering came, David didn’t take it quietly. He questioned it. He grieved and protested and sometimes sounded completely abandoned. But he kept dragging the pain back into the relationship instead of walking away from it. He never handed his goodness to God like a claim ticket. He just kept walking. Barefoot, bleeding, still reaching.

No Transaction: Saul Failed

Saul acted like being chosen came with a guarantee.

Anointed, chosen, head and shoulders above everyone else, and somewhere under all that oil he decided that being picked meant he was safe. God picked me, so nothing can touch me.

When Samuel ran late and the army got restless, Saul didn’t wait. He offered the sacrifice himself. It wasn’t open rebellion, at least not at first. It was fear. Fear of losing control, of losing the position he was sure he’d been handed.

Samuel showed up while the fallout was still landing and called it what it was. Saul didn’t drop into humility. He explained himself. He argued his case. He read like a man who thought the terms had been changed on him, like being chosen should have shielded him from ever losing anything.

I was chosen. I deserve stability. I deserve to keep what I have.

He didn’t fall because he lost a battle. He fell because he thought being chosen meant being protected from consequences. David treated the anointing as a responsibility. Saul treated it as something he’d earned the right to keep. That difference cost one of them a kingdom.

No Transaction: What I Had to Unlearn

For most of my life I thought my relationship with God ran on a formula. Do the right things, pray, stay faithful, keep the rules, and He protects you and sets you on steady ground. That belief kept me going for a long time. Then my son was diagnosed. Terminal, no cure. And the formula shattered. I hid in my shop, buried in guilt, sure I’d failed or He had.

Now, at 46, after all the mess and all the chaos, I see it differently. I’m no closer to a clean answer, but I’m deeper in the struggle, and I like who I’m becoming. Not because I’ve got it figured out. Because I’m learning to act out of conviction instead of bargaining for an outcome. I do the right thing because it’s right. No ledger. No bargains.

Even now I catch myself reaching for the old math. If God had chosen differently, my son might have been healed. My dad might still be here.

I don’t know why some suffering gets allowed, or why some prayers just meet silence. I don’t know how much of it is God’s will and how much is human choice, or mortality, or just a world where terrible things happen. But here’s where it turned for me. The moment I stopped asking why God did this to me, the moment I stopped assuming I was being punished, I could show up again. I still didn’t have the answers. I didn’t get a pass from the pain. But I had a choice, and I made it, not to earn anything, just so guilt would stop keeping me quiet. That’s what gives me strength now. Not that bad things stopped coming, but that I quit reading punishment into every heartbreak. Life is a mess. Sometimes good people get hurt, not because God failed them, but because this world throws things that don’t follow a formula. Once I accepted that and quit hunting for blame, I could show up broken and still do the next right thing.

The Excuse

I’ve heard the phrase my whole life. If God wants it, it’ll happen. In Spanish it’s Si Dios quiere. If God wills it.

Sometimes there’s real humility in that. It reminds you that you’re not running everything. But I’ve watched it turn into a hiding place too, a way to dodge the choosing and the risking and the responsibility. I know that temptation because I’ve lived in it.

Waiting can look like faith from the outside. Sometimes it is faith. Other times, for me, it’s been fear wearing religious clothes.

Agency wrecks the idea of a clean transaction with God. People choose differently than you hoped. Good intentions fade. Doors close. Prayer doesn’t override somebody else’s freedom, and it doesn’t guarantee the ending I think should happen. Knowing that hasn’t made faith easier. If anything it made it harder. It means I can’t always wait for certainty before I move. I have to think, choose, act, and live with the fact that I might be reading God wrong, or that the right move might still hurt.

I don’t know exactly where God’s will ends and human choice begins. I don’t know why some prayers get answered and others just disappear. What I’m starting to understand is that the not-knowing doesn’t get me off the hook. I still have hands to build with, a mind to think with, a life sitting right in front of me. Maybe faith isn’t waiting until God makes the path obvious. Maybe sometimes it’s taking the next honest step and admitting out loud that I can’t see where it goes.

No Deal

Good isn’t a bribe. It isn’t insurance or leverage or a guarantee of anything. It’s identity. It’s choosing who you are when there’s no payoff for being it.

I always believed that when the moment came, I’d know how to show up. Then everything shattered and I disappeared into guilt and fear and my own collapse. After the diagnosis, after all of it, I was lost. And after the incarceration there was no chance left to make it right. No late-night talks. No sitting by his bed. No rebuilding. The door shut before I could get back through it.

But I learned something. Showing up is almost never one dramatic moment. It’s a string of small choices made in the life that’s still in front of you. I can’t undo the past. I can still show up in the ways that are left. I can be honest with myself. I can choose humility even when it aches.

I still breathe. I still stand. And every time I do, I turn my back on that old lie that good is a trade, and I stand anyway, broken and unsure and still here.

No deal. No reward. Just showing up. Barefoot, still breathing. For now, that has to be enough.