Shelf Life

Day 7 - The waiting room of prayer

“When it was time for Elizabeth to have her baby, she gave birth to a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy, and they shared her joy. On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him after his father Zechariah, but his mother spoke up and said, “No! He is to be called John.” They said to her “There is no one among your relatives who has that name.”

Then they made signs to his father, to find out what he would like to name the child. He asked for a writing tablet, and to everyone’s astonishment he wrote, “His name is John.” Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue set free, and he began to speak, praising God. All the neighbors were filled with awe, and throughout the hill country of Judea people were talking about all these things. Everyone who heard this wondered about it, asking, “What then is this child going to be?” For the Lord’s hand was with him.” -Luke 1:57-66

(Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash)

It must have been an incredible nine months. Earlier in chapter 1, we read about how the angel Gabriel had come to Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah and spoken to him that his wife would become pregnant. The whole experience clearly caught him off guard and he questioned Gabriel asking “How shall I know this?” (Lk 1:18), which resulted in Zechariah being unable to speak out loud until the child was born. Imagine Elizabeth being married to a man who cannot speak for nine months! ;-)

There is another part of that encounter with the angel Gabriel that is important for us to consider: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah: your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you are to give him the name John.” (Lk. 1:13).

Luke has already told us that at this point Zechariah and Elizabeth were ‘advanced in years’. It is very likely that their prayers for a child had been prayed many years earlier and that by this point they had stopped expecting those prayers to be answered. At the very least, the prayers for a child had gone unanswered for years and years. Their hope for a baby was certainly fading, if not entirely gone by this point.

When our prayers ascend to God, they do not have a ‘shelf life’; they do not have an expiration or ‘best before’ date. The majority of the prayers that we have prayed get forgotten over time, through the passage of years, but God never forgets. There is not a prayer that you have ever prayed that God has forgotten. Our hope may fade at times, but our prayers live on before God in ways that we cannot begin to imagine.

This sounds good, but we must be honest: there is pain in the waiting room of unanswered prayer. We have all prayed prayers, asking God for things that deeply mattered to us. We prayed them from a deep part of our soul and we held those requests close to our hearts. There is confusion and disappointment and often, if we are honest, frustration and anger when it seems that God is not answering those prayers. Looking at the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah is not meant to placate those painful realities in our lives, but it can serve as a beacon of hope for us, to hear and ponder that our prayers live on before God, when we may think that all hope is lost.

I’d love to hear from you! What is one of your favourite Scriptures about prayer? Is there a passage of the Bible that gives hope in prayer? Share it in the comments section below and let’s encourage each other today!