The Stream Under The Dry Bed

The river through that valley runs underground in summer.

You would not know it to look. The bed goes to pale stone and dust and you can walk the whole length of it in ordinary shoes, and there is a stretch by the second bridge where the children play in August as though it had never been a river at all.

It is running the entire time. Two feet down, sometimes less. If you dig at the right place with your hands you will be wet through in about a minute and the water will be cold.

She knows all that. She grew up in that valley.

Here is the other thing, and the river is only the picture.

She has felt nothing when she prays for about two years.

Not dryness in the dramatic sense. Nothing has gone wrong and she has not stopped. She prays every single day, in the mornings, at the same window, the way she has since she was in her twenties.

It just goes nowhere. It has the texture of talking in an empty room, and it has had that texture for about twenty four months, and she has kept doing it anyway, which she would tell you is either faithfulness or stubbornness and she cannot always tell which.

And the conclusion she has quietly reached, and has told nobody, is that whatever she used to have has drained away, and that she is now a woman who does a thing out of habit that other people do out of something real.

If you have prayed into an empty room for a long time, come and sit down on these stones. Nobody is going to ask you to feel anything.

The green comes from where the root is, not from the weather

There is a picture in Jeremiah that is worth reading as botany rather than as encouragement.

He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.Jeremiah 17:8

Look at what is doing the work. The tree is not trying harder than the grass. It has not stored rain from a better year. Its roots are in the stream, and the drought is happening above ground while the supply is happening below it, and the two are not connected in the way that anybody standing in the heat assumes they are.

That is the whole picture, and it maps exactly onto two years at a window.

The dryness you can feel is weather. The supply is not weather.

You are not running on empty, and the supply under you did not stop when the feeling did. Jeremiah 17:8 puts the root in the stream in the present tense, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Jesus called a spring of water welling up to eternal life, which means what you cannot feel is not the same as what is not there.

Faithfulness in a dry stretch is not stubbornness

Now let me answer the thing you said about yourself, because it is the unkindest sentence in your whole account and it is not true.

You said you cannot tell whether two years of praying into nothing is faithfulness or stubbornness.

Look at what you have actually done. Every morning, at the same window, for twenty four months, with no return of any kind, you have gone on speaking to God. There is a word for that, and Scripture uses it constantly, and it is not stubbornness.

Nobody is calling those two years wasted and nobody is calling them empty. They may well turn out to be the most solid stretch of your entire life, and you will not be able to see that from inside it, and that is normal.

You are still growing, and you are being fed right now, as you read. Psalm 1:3 says the tree planted by streams of water yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the feeding rather than your capacity to feel it, so nothing about two dry years is a report on the root.

And there is no scheme here. No plan, no method for getting the feeling back, nothing with a name. This site does not hand anybody one and I am not about to start.

Here is the entire offer. Not more praying. Slower reading.

You have not lost anything, and the water is still under this bed. Isaiah 55:11 says His word does not return empty but accomplishes what He purposes, and it is His Spirit who carries it in whether or not you feel it arriving, which is exactly why a passage read slowly out loud can do its work in a season that feels like an empty room.

And under all of it, the ground this site stands on: God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. The root is not your achievement and neither is the feeling. It is where He planted you, and He planted you by water.