A Place for the Answers

Sometimes we don’t get answers (to our prayers) because there is no place for God to put the answer. In the Doctrine & Covenants, the ninety-eighth section, in the first few verses, the Lord introduces another idea of another letter. I call it Holding Places of the Heart.

I say unto you my friends, fear not, let your hearts be comforted; rejoice evermore, and in everything give thanks; Waiting patiently on the Lord, for your prayers have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and are recorded with this seal and testament—the Lord hath sworn and decreed they shall be granted. He giveth this promise unto you, with an immutable covenant that they shall be fulfilled; and all things wherewith you have been afflicted shall work together for your good. (1-3)

Now God tends to do everything backwards; we worship a backwards God, in a sense. I say, “Lord, help me understand and then I can believe.” But in the scriptures, the Lord says, “No, believe and then you will understand.” I say that’s backwards, and He says, “No, you have it backwards.” So here the Lord says, “Be comforted, rejoice, give thanks, then I’ll answer your prayers.” And I say, “Lord, answer my prayers, and then I’ll be comforted, rejoice, and give thanks.” That is backwards.

Now sometimes the reason the Lord doesn’t answer is because He has a wonderful answer, a comforting answer, a rejoicing answer, and He says, “Where do I put it? There is no place yet in your heart, in your mind for me to put the answer. But life will create a holding place for the answer. So be patient; in time it will come. I have recorded your prayers. I know your needs. I will answer it when the holding place has been created.” Let me give you an example of that if I may:

My parents were divorced when I was one year old. My father, for not the best of reasons, left the family. That caused certain concerns, certain problems, certain challenges for my mother, my two sisters, and myself.

If you were age fourteen and you were me and you prayed, “Father in Heaven, help me be at peace and forgive my father for having left his family,” that’s a good prayer; that’s a good desire—I received no answer.

At eighteen, you’re praying, “Father in Heaven, help me be at peace and find solace, and comfort, and forgiveness about this particular episode.” My father had very little to do with us as we were growing up. One day a year he would take us to Lagoon in Utah. That was my only contact with my father, growing up.

I got married. I’m praying. I had two daughters, two sons. Now I’m over thirty years of age. One day I was preparing to give a talk on parenting. Now my mother was an absolute saint. I can’t imagine a boy being given a greater mother than the mother I was given; and everybody who knows my mother would agree with that. I was thinking, as I was preparing to talk about how to raise children, that I would talk about my mother. But the Spirit seemed to say, “You need to talk, and you need to think about your father.” I wondered, “What do I say about my father? I hardly know my father. I was not raised with him; I had no contact with my father.”

Just at that moment as I’m pondering about my father, my two sons—I had two at the time, my third son wasn’t born yet—they were about six and two years of age; they came in and they stood in front of me where I was sitting in the family room; they just stood there in front of me staring at me, the older brother standing behind his younger brother. I looked at those two boys and the Spirit just washed my brain with memories of things I had done with those boys. Simple things, nothing important:

Trick-or-treating, carving Halloween pumpkins, Christmas mornings, blowing out birthday candles, looking at turtles at the pond, piggyback rides, listening to their Primary talks, listening to their prayers, bedtime stories, the first puppy, catching a fish in the same fishing hole I caught my first fish in.

Nothing critical, nothing important. Just the everyday memories that I as a father had shared with those boys in six years of my being a father. As I was thinking of those things, the Lord said, “Now Mike, life has carved a holding place in your heart, and I will give you the answer”; and this is what He said: “Now that you are a father, now that you know a father’s joys and love, would you be the son who lost his father? Or the father who lost his son?”

Do you understand what the Lord was saying to me? I began to weep. I just sobbed. I grabbed those two boys and I just hugged them, sobbing—not for me—for my father. Because I knew the tragedy of his life greater than he knew it. I knew what he missed. I knew that it was a greater tragedy for him to have missed all those wonderful things with his family, than it was for me, as a son, to have missed them with a father.

My wife came in, she said, “For heaven’s sake Mike, what’s the matter?” I was sobbing, clinging to my boys. I said, “I can’t talk about it now.” I went up to the bathroom and just cried and cried, cried myself dry—for my father.

God always had an answer. But why didn’t He give it to me at age fourteen, or eighteen, or when I was married, or when I was the father of two daughters? It had to be when I was the father of boys and had shared enough life with those boys to comprehend the answer that God would give. The easiest thing in the world for me to forgive was my father for having left the family. But it took life to create the space for God to put the answer.

S Michael Wilcox
BYU-H March 31, 2009