Not My Will, but Yours Be Done.

Yesterday I told you about the injury that ended my music career, the back pain in my twenties that slowly took away the one thing I had built my whole life around.

What I didn't tell you is that I prayed about it. A lot. It's the injury I was talking about in this devotional Prayer Moves Mountains.

I asked Him more times than I can count, for a long time. And the answer was no. I learnt to deal with the pain, but the career ended anyway. The door stayed shut.

And once the disappointment settles, a quieter thought creeps in, one that hurts worse than the no itself. The one caused by unanswered prayer.

I think we all have a long list of prayers that have gone unanswered or answered with a no. But you're not alone in that.

The night before He died, Jesus knelt in Gethsemane and begged His Father for one thing. "Father, if You are willing, take this cup from me."

He prayed it in agony, His face to the ground, His sweat falling like blood. He prayed it three times. And the cup did not pass. The most beloved Son who ever lived asked His Father to change the plan, and the answer was no.

Even Jesus got a no.

And He knew. That is what I keep returning to. Before He ever knelt down, He knew the cup wouldn't pass. He had said it Himself, over and over, that He came to die. It was the reason He came.

So when He asked for the cup to be taken, He was asking for the one thing He knew couldn't be given, because our rescue depended on the answer being no.

And still He prayed it. He didn't swallow His anguish or pretend He was fine. He let His Father hear exactly how much He didn't want this.

And the Father heard Him. Scripture says it plainly: He was heard. Heard, and still told no. Because being heard and getting what you ask for were never the same thing.

That wasn't the only prayer of His that didn't get the answer we'd expect. On that same last night, Jesus prayed that everyone who would ever follow Him would be one, completely united, the way He and the Father are one.

Two thousand years later, the church is splintered into countless pieces, divided over buildings and doctrine and pride. That prayer is still waiting.

But notice the difference. The no in the garden was God's will. The divided church is not. God never wanted His people fractured. That prayer isn't waiting because the Father refused it, but because we keep getting in the way of it.

I can't look at a child dying of cancer, or a phone call in the middle of the night, or a marriage no one wanted to end, and tell you that was God's will the way the cross was God's will.

I don't believe it was.

Jesus healed the sick. He wept at a grave. Scripture calls death an enemy, not a friend. Some prayers go unanswered not because God wanted the heartbreak, but because we live in a world that is broken and not yet made new.

I'm not a theologian. I can't explain why one prayer is answered and another is not, or which sorrows carry a purpose and which are simply the wreckage of a fallen world.

Wiser people have spent their whole lives on that question and come up short.

But this is what I do have, and what I hold onto until the day it all makes sense.

When the worst suffering imaginable unfolded, God didn't watch it from a safe distance. He climbed into it. He took on skin, knelt in the dirt, and felt His own prayer go unanswered, so that you would never face a single no alone.

The God you are crying out to isn't far from your pain. He has tasted it.

And the cross wasn't the end. Three days later the grave was empty. So no is never the final word.

There is a day coming when every prayer for healing is answered in full, when the cancer and the accident and the goodbye are undone, when God wipes away every tear, and death itself dies. I'll even be playing double bass in the worship band in heaven.

So today, like Jesus in that garden, when His own request was met with no, I'll pray the way He did.

Not my will, but Yours be done.