Answers to prayers
Answers to prayers
If you are praying about something hard right now, and you cannot tell whether the Lord is answering — or if you are trying to pray and feeling like nothing is reaching home — this post is for you.
You are not alone in the not-knowing. You may be hearing more than you realize.
Val & Bruce
Choices — where the deciding happens
A note before we begin: although the experiences we share in this post grew out of our marriages and the decisions we faced about divorce, what we came to learn about prayer applies to nearly every day of our lives. These are among the most profound, life-altering, and peace-producing understandings we have come to. The decision in your life that brought you here may not be a decision about marriage at all. The teaching is the same.
The quiet uncertainty
Most faithful people will tell you, without hesitation, that the Lord answers prayers. It’s a doctrine we know and believe we understand.
But ask the same people a more particular question — when was the last time you received an answer to one of your own prayers, and were certain that you had? — and the air in the room changes. Many people have to think back years. Some go all the way back to their missions. Others can’t think of a recent moment they would stake anything on.
This is not a small problem. Underneath the doctrine many of us hold, there is a quiet worry: I’m not sure I would recognize an answer if I got one. Or worse: the Lord answers other people’s prayers but maybe not mine. That worry is harder to name than disappointment, because it carries shame inside it. If I cannot hear, perhaps something is wrong with me.
We want to say plainly, before going any further: nothing is wrong with you. The Lord is not silent because you are unworthy. He is not absent because you are too young, or too old, or too scarred, or too ordinary. He hears every prayer you have ever offered. The question this post is trying to help with is not whether He answers, but what answers can look like — because they often look different than what we were taught to expect.
What an answer can look like
Before we name the shapes an answer can take, we want to share something we’ve learned about how to listen for them.
When we were younger, prayer felt mostly like asking. You said the words, you finished, you got up, you went on with your day, and the answer either came or it didn’t. We’ve come to a different practice over the years. Rather than asking and then running off to do something else, we sit with the request — what the scriptures call pondering. We hold the question in our minds. We let it open. And while we hold it, we deliberately consider the different shapes an answer might take: Is the answer yes? Is it no? Is it something different than I asked for? Is the Lord telling me to decide? Is it not yet? Just running through the possibilities — slowly, with the question sitting open — has made us much more able to recognize the answers when they come. This pattern has proven far more effective for us than simply asking.
The categories below are the shapes we’ve seen answers take in our own lives. Read them as a vocabulary you’re being given for an experience you’re already learning to have.
Yes — the answer you hoped for
Sometimes the answer is the one you were hoping for. The thing you asked about, granted. The path you wanted, opened. These answers still take faith — to recognize, to trust, and to act on — but they are the easiest to name. You walk away from the prayer with the clarity you came looking for.
These are the stories we hear most often in church. They are real. They happen. But in our experience, they are not the most common.
No — the answer you didn’t want
Sometimes the answer is no. It is harder to receive than yes, but it is no less an answer.
The Savior Himself, in the only prayer He offered for His own sake, asked the Father if there might be another way. Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me. The Father’s answer was no. The Savior received that no with perfect faith — nevertheless, not My will, but Thine, be done — and walked into the work the no required of Him.
If the Savior received a no, we should not be surprised when we do.
Something different than you asked for
Sometimes the answer is not the one we asked about at all. It is something else, given in place of what we wanted, and it takes us a while to recognize that it was an answer.
Nephi, bound by his brothers in the wilderness, prayed that the Lord would burst his bands. The bands were loosed. The Lord answered the prayer — but along a different geometry than the one Nephi requested. Loosed worked. Burst would have worked too, and been more exciting, but loosed was what he received.
Bruce
I have noticed a pattern in my own prayer life. I often ask for something to make my life easier. The Lord generally responds with something to help me become stronger, or kinder, or more gracious — in small ways, more like Him. The two are not the same. They are not always close to each other. But over time I have come to see His answers as more generous than my requests, even when they don’t feel that way at first.
You decide
Sometimes the answer is you decide. President Oaks taught this directly: “A desire to be led by the Lord is a strength, but it needs to be accompanied by an understanding that our Heavenly Father leaves many decisions for our personal choices.” He went on: “Persons who try to shift all decision making to the Lord and plead for revelation in every choice will soon find circumstances in which they pray for guidance and don’t receive it.”
This kind of answer is harder to hear than it seems, because it doesn’t sound like an answer at all. It sounds like nothing. But it is something. It is the Lord saying I trust you with this. Use the mind I gave you. Counsel with people who love you. Study it out. Choose.
The goal is not to make every small decision a revelation. Heavenly Father knows which of your decisions matter, and how to bless you most.
One more thing we want to say about deciding: when we were younger, we saw the process of praying and seeking answers as a solo endeavor. As we’ve gotten older — and hopefully a little wiser — we’ve come to believe that counseling together with someone you respect and trust is itself a powerful channel of revelation. Ecclesiastes puts it plainly: Two are better than one… for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow. You don’t have to be alone with the deciding. Bring it to a trusted person. Pray together. Listen together. The Lord often speaks more clearly when two people are listening.
Not yet
Sometimes the answer is wait. The pieces aren’t yet in place. The understanding you need hasn’t arrived. The people you’d need to counsel with haven’t entered your life yet. The Lord is preparing something, but it isn’t ready.
“Not yet” is one of the most common answers, and one of the most easily mistaken for silence. We rarely know in the moment that what we are receiving is a “not yet.” We usually only see it that way looking back.
Silence
And sometimes — even for the deepest and most important questions of our lives — there is silence.
Of all the shapes an answer can take, silence is the hardest to receive. It feels like absence. It feels like rejection. It feels like proof that the doctrine was always meant for someone else. Silence is the answer we are least prepared to recognize, because it does not look like an answer at all.
The next section is about silence.
On silence
The Savior, on the cross, cried out: My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?
This is the most desolate sentence in scripture. It is also one of the most instructive. President Spencer W. Kimball read this moment as the Father, in His perfect love, letting His Only Begotten Son finish this work without Him. Not absent. Not turned away. Trusting.
It is one of the great teachings of the gospel that the Father’s silence on the cross was not abandonment. It was the highest form of trust the Father had ever offered.
If the Father offered that kind of silence to His Beloved Son — in response to His cry of anguish, and at the moment of His deepest pain — perhaps the silence we sometimes receive is not what we feared it was, either.
Bruce
By the time the question of divorce came in earnest, I was no stranger to prayer. I had spent my life learning to recognize how the Lord speaks. Yes had come. No had come. Promptings, impressions, the steady warmth of confirmation — I had felt all of them at different points, and I had worked hard to learn how to tell them apart. I trusted the Lord to answer. I had no doubt that He would.
So when I began praying in earnest about whether to divorce — fasting, going to the temple, asking with everything I had — I expected an answer. Probably not the answer I wanted. But an answer. Something I could recognize.
What I got instead was silence.
Not a quiet whisper that I needed to attune myself to. Not a feeling that took practice to detect. Silence, of a kind I had not encountered before, on the most important question of my life.
I want to be careful about what I say next, because I think it matters. I never felt that the Lord had abandoned me. I never doubted that He was there. That isn’t in me. What I doubted was myself. I wondered what I was missing. I wondered if I was asking wrong, or listening wrong, or somehow blocking the answer that I assumed must be there to receive. I knew how to hear Him. Why couldn’t I hear Him now?
Eventually I had to act. There was no more waiting available to me. So I made a deliberate choice. I told myself I was walking off a cliff in the dark — and that I was going to do it anyway, on my own best judgment, because the Lord had not given me anything else to walk on. I was not afraid that He would not catch me. I was afraid that I had misjudged what He was asking of me. But I had to choose. So I chose.
The understanding came years later. And it was not a confirmation of the choice. It was something different — something I think of now as more important than confirmation would have been. What I came to understand was why the silence had been silence. The Lord, in not answering, had been saying something to me. He had been saying: I trust you to make this decision. I am not going to take it from you. The growth available to you on the other side of this requires that you walk through it without Me handing you the answer. I am here. I have always been here. But this one is yours.
That understanding did not tell me anything about whether the decision was right. It told me everything about what the silence had meant. And once I understood that, I could see the silence as the most generous thing the Lord could have given me. He had not been withholding. He had been trusting.
I do not know what your silence means. I will not pretend to. But I have come to believe that ours is rarely what we fear it is.
What’s true of silence is also true, in different ways, of the other answers that don’t look like answers. The “no” that wounded you. The “not yet” that has stretched into years. The “you decide” that has felt like a burden rather than a trust. Each of these can be reframed when you are willing to see it differently. The Lord is doing something through every one of them, even when you cannot see what it is.
Val’s voice
Bruce’s silence was one shape of what the Lord can give. Val’s experience took a different shape, and we want to name it because it may be closer to some of your experiences than his.
Val
For most of my marriage, I did not pray about divorce. I did not even allow myself to think about it directly. I prayed for patience. I prayed for peace. I prayed for endurance. I prayed for my husband to overcome and recover. I prayed for our family. I held the marriage as the thing that had to be saved, and I bent my prayers around saving it.
About two decades in, after a traumatic event that threatened our whole family, I finally prayed about divorce directly. For several nights in a row, on my knees, I pleaded.
The answer to one of those prayers came almost as a voice in my mind. It was a line from my patriarchal blessing — one I had received as a youth, telling me to choose my husband wisely, because this marriage would be for eternity, with an eternal family life. The next night I heard the same voice with the same message. I took it as the Lord telling me to stay.
I stayed.
Years later, after another decision point I will describe in a moment, I came to understand that the answer I had received was true — but it was not the whole truth. The Lord had been telling me something at the time: not yet. And the Lord had also been promising me something I could not yet see: that the eternal marriage my blessing described was still ahead of me, just not on the path I was on. The promise was real. The timing was not what I had assumed.
I want to say this carefully, because it matters: I did not misread the answer. The Lord told me to stay, and I obeyed, and the obedience was right. The years that followed were the years I needed to become someone who could one day make a different decision, and recognize a different relationship as the fulfillment of the same promise. The “no” I received then was a “no” and a “not yet” and a promise — all at once, all true.
Then, after more years, a disturbing event occurred and I knew my marriage was over. This time I did not pray about it. I did not talk to the bishop. I did not ask anyone whether I should leave. I knew. The decision was made within days through intense anguish, grief, and tears. There was no question in me, even though years earlier I had felt I had been told to stay. I finally accepted that it was broken to the point of no return.
The confirmation came later when additional facts emerged. It was a relief to know. It confirmed what I had already decided.
Looking back at the long stretches of silence in between — the prayers for guidance that seemed to go unanswered, the years I felt abandoned — I see now that I had been given freedom. Freedom to make my own choices. To learn and understand. To study and practice. To grow into the person I needed to be by the time I found Bruce. The silence I had read as abandonment was, in retrospect, the Lord trusting me to do the work that would shape the rest of my life.
If you are praying right now about something hard, and the answers are not coming the way you were taught to expect — please do not assume the silence means what it feels like it means. It rarely does.
Bruce held his faith through the silence. Val read the silence as freedom in retrospect. Your experience may be neither. You may have felt anger, withdrawal, exhaustion, numbness, or something we have no words for at all. Wherever you have gone with God, He has gone with you — and He is there now. He still loves you. He understands you perfectly. He will not walk away from you, even when that’s what you have done to Him. Whatever you are bringing to Him today, He can hold it.
Why this is the way it is
So now we come to the heart of the question: if the Lord can answer prayers, why doesn’t He just answer every one of them, clearly, the moment we ask?
After wrestling with this question for many years, we have come to believe that the answer to it is the most important thing the gospel teaches about prayer.
We came to this earth to grow. Not to be told what to do — that, we already had. We came here to develop judgment, to face hard things, to make choices, to bear consequences, to learn, to change, and over the long arc of a life to become more like our Heavenly Father. The making of choices is not incidental to that becoming. It is the means.
If every prayer were answered immediately and unmistakably, we would never develop the very faculties we came to develop. There would be no judgment. There would be no faith. There would be no growth. We would be, at the end of our lives, the same beings we were at the beginning, only older.
So the Lord, who loves us more than we can imagine, sometimes withholds the clarity we ask for — not because He is silent, but because His silence is the curriculum. And not only His silence: His “no,” His “not yet,” His “you decide,” His “something different than you asked for” — each of these is part of the same curriculum, shaping us in ways an immediate yes never could.
James wrote, in the words of the Joseph Smith Translation: count it all joy when ye fall into many afflictions; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. The very next verse: if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God.
The sequence matters. The patience comes first. The wisdom comes through it.
This is not a comforting answer for someone in the middle of the silence — or in the middle of the no, or the not yet, or the burden of deciding alone. We know. But it is, in our experience, a true one. The biggest decisions of our lives — the ones that shape who we become — are precisely the decisions the Lord most often leaves to us. Not because He doesn’t care. Because He does.
If you are in the silence right now
A few things to hold, gently, if you are praying about something hard and the answer has not come — or has come in a shape you didn’t recognize.
Recognize that answers come in many forms. You may have already received one, and not yet noticed it as an answer. The “no” that you read as silence; the “you decide” that didn’t sound like an answer; the “not yet” that felt like rejection; the “something different” that you set aside because it wasn’t what you asked for — they may all have been answers you have not yet learned to see.
Be patient. This is not a polite suggestion. It is a doctrine. The patience is part of the answer the Lord is giving you.
Counsel with people who love you. The Lord often sends His answers through other people — your spouse if appropriate, a trusted friend, a counselor, an ecclesiastical leader. The answer rarely comes through one channel only.
Act on your best judgment. The Lord can steer a moving life more easily than a still one. If you have studied, prayed, counseled, and waited, and the answer still has not come, act on what you know. Acting in faith is not the same as acting without it.
Keep listening. The understanding may come long after the deciding. The confirmation may come through facts that emerge, or relationships that change, or an inner sense that arrives years later. Keep your ears open for it. It will come.
Count your blessings. Gratitude opens the channel.
Serve someone else. Sometimes the answer comes when we stop asking about ourselves.
Val & Bruce
To the friend praying right now about something hard — something that would change your life if you knew the answer, and that feels like it is breaking you while you wait for it: we want to say one thing to you.
The silence is not what it feels like. It is not absence. It is not unworthiness. It is not the Lord turning away. Sometimes — often, in our experience — the silence is the Lord trusting you to do this with Him, even when you cannot feel His hand on your shoulder. He has not left. He will not leave. He is doing something in you, and through you, that the silence is part of.
Keep listening. Keep praying. Keep moving. The answer will come, in its time and in its way, and one day you will look back and see that He was there the whole time, holding what you could not see, working in you the becoming that brought you here.
When you come out of the darkness, you will not be the same person who walked into it. That is the point. That is the gift. The path you are on — the one that feels like it has no map — is the path that will make you who you are becoming.
You are loved. You are known. You are not alone.
When you’re ready, the next post is waiting.
Counsel — who to talk to and who not to →A note from us
If something in this post lands for you — or doesn’t — we’d love to hear from you. The post you just read came together over many drafts and conversations, and the next one will too. Your reflections shape what we write next.
And if someone you love is in the silence right now, please feel welcome to share this with them.