Of all the things a Christian can ask God for, reconciliation with an estranged relative looks like the safest request there is. Scripture prizes it. Nobody prays for it out of greed. So when someone fasts and prays for years and the relative dies first, the silence feels like evidence: God either never heard, or heard and did not care. Neither conclusion follows. Both depend on an unstated premise, that a God who hears a good request will grant it as asked, and Scripture itself contradicts that premise. What remains is a real unknown about God’s reasons, which is a different thing from his absence.
That answer needs testing against a case that resists comfort. Michael Rosiers, a middle school teacher in Dallas, supplies one, and he is unusually honest about how the argument felt from the inside.
The argument, stated fairly
Rosiers was estranged from a cousin. For years he fasted and prayed for the two of them to be reconciled, and he pictured them one day on a porch, talking and laughing. Then a phone call on his way to work told him his cousin had died. The relationship was never repaired.
This loss struck harder than his other disappointments because the request was so clearly good. “And I just knew that that was something that God would want reconciliation,” he recalled. His verdict on what happened was blunt: “I just felt that that was cruel.” He never doubted God’s power. The trouble was what he called “a disconnect in him, in him wanting to do it, him being able to do it, and him not doing it.”
Set out step by step, the reasoning looks like this:
- God is able to bring about reconciliation.
- God wants reconciliation.
- Rosiers asked sincerely and persistently, with fasting.
- Reconciliation did not happen.
- So either God did not hear, or God heard and did not care about Rosiers.
This is a serious argument, and many believers have been shaken by some version of it. Rosiers kept praying, so he did not settle on the first option. He settled on a quieter and more painful one: “I just didn’t feel like he was being mindful of me.” The question is whether that conclusion follows from the facts.
The premise doing the work
The first four lines do not reach the fifth by themselves. Something has to connect them, and the connecting link goes unspoken: if God hears a request for something good and is able to do it, he will do it, in the way and at the time requested.
In grief that premise feels self-evident. It is also carrying the entire argument. Without it, the facts are consistent with a God who is able, who values reconciliation, who heard every prayer, and who still did not bring it about in this case, for reasons left unstated. The only thing established is that we do not know why.
Rosiers identified a second hidden step in his own thinking, and it may matter more. He concluded God had gotten it wrong because, in his words, “I couldn’t see how he was going to make it work out.” He then named the move outright: “because I couldn’t see it,” this must be a time God missed.
That moves from I see no good reason to there is no good reason. Sometimes the move is fair. If you scan an empty table for your keys and see nothing, you may conclude they are elsewhere. The inference works only when you would expect to see the thing if it were there. A grieving person, inside one moment, with no access to another person’s heart or to the years ahead, is badly placed to see God’s purposes. Failing to find one from there tells us a great deal about the vantage point and very little about God.
Rosiers also explained where the premise came from. His early faith was shaped by name-it-and-claim-it teaching, and in those years answers seemed to arrive almost overnight. In that model, a granted request is how you know you were heard. The same model then guarantees that an ungranted request means you were ignored. The theology had installed the premise long before the loss arrived.
Scripture’s counterexamples
A general rule falls to a single counterexample. If anyone God certainly heard asked for something and did not receive it, the premise is false.
The Gospels give the clearest case. In Gethsemane Jesus prayed, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39). The cup did not pass. He went to the cross. No Christian reading of the scene concludes that the Father ignored the Son.
Hebrews looks at the same night and says Jesus “offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared” (Hebrews 5:7). The writer holds together the very facts a grieving mind wants to pull apart. God could save him from death. He was heard. He died. Interpreters differ on what being heard meant here; a common reading points to deliverance through death in the resurrection rather than rescue from dying. On every reading, the text separates being heard from being spared.
Paul supplies a second case. He asked three times for his thorn in the flesh to be removed, and he records the reply he received: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). He got an answer, and it was a different one from the answer he sought.
These passages are narrative. They describe what happened rather than laying down a rule, and they do not prove that every unanswered prayer conceals a good outcome. Their work here is narrower and more decisive: they refute the claim that being heard means receiving what you asked for. The Son of God is the counterexample.
The promise in 1 John
The strongest objection comes from a verse Rosiers reached for himself, half remembering a promise tied to God’s will. The passage reads: “And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us” (1 John 5:14). The next verse adds that “we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him” (1 John 5:15). Reconciliation is surely God’s will. Doesn’t the promise apply?
Two limits keep the objection from reaching its target.
First, knowing a thing is good in general is different from knowing that one particular outcome, by particular means, before a particular deadline, is what God wills. Scripture plainly values reconciliation. That fact still leaves open whether God had willed that this estrangement would be healed before this death. The promise hangs on God’s will, and his specific will is exactly what the person praying lacks. John gives believers no method for converting a general good into a guaranteed event.
Second, reconciliation always involves someone else. A prayer about weather or a diagnosis concerns circumstances. A prayer for reconciliation asks God to work in another person’s heart, history and choices. Christians disagree about how God’s sovereignty relates to human freedom, and that question stays open. On any account, a request that depends on another person’s response cannot operate like a switch.
The objection set out to show that God broke a promise, and it cannot bear that weight. The verse it relies on also says, in so many words, that “he heareth us.” Hearing is the very thing the grieving argument denies.
What removing the premise leaves behind
Exposing the hidden premise answers one question and sharpens another. The argument that God was absent fails. A harder argument survives: a God who heard, who could have acted, and who chose not to, still owes the sufferer an explanation that he has not given. Call it the problem of divine reasons. Silence about those reasons can feel almost worse than absence, because it means the outcome was permitted by someone who was paying attention.
Honesty requires saying what can and cannot be answered here. The claim that God has good reasons we cannot see is not a proof, and a skeptic can fairly point out that unseen reasons are hard to test. What the Christian can say is that the claim rests on evidence beyond this one loss. The same Gethsemane scene that breaks the false premise also shows a Son who asked, was refused, and trusted the Father’s purpose anyway, a purpose the resurrection later revealed. That is grounds for trust, and it stops short of an explanation. Lisa Fields frames the remaining issue as a question of trust, asking, “Do I believe that God stewards his power well?” That question survives every piece of logic in this article. Scripture leaves room for it, and lament, the honest complaint addressed to God, is one of the forms faith takes while it waits.
Where the conclusion leads if left standing
One way to judge a premise is to follow what it produces. In the years after the funeral, Rosiers found his thoughts moving from his cousin to himself. His cousin had died before thirty, and he began to wonder whether he would too, asking, “what if God feels that he can get more glory from my death than from my life?” He wrestled with that fear for years.
This is how a faulty premise spreads. Once an ungranted request becomes a message about how much God cares for you, every later loss reads as confirmation, and the future starts to look like more of the same. Reasoning that began with one prayer ended in fear about his own life.
Meanwhile his life kept producing evidence that did not fit his conclusion. While angry with God he still prayed for anyone who came to him with a need. He stepped down from the praise team, yet songs kept reaching him and ministering to him. At church a woman took his hands and danced with him while he wanted to be left alone. Looking back, he is grateful “that she wasn’t moved by my face, my facial expressions, my countenance,” because “I needed the love of God.” A skeptic could explain all of this as habit and kind neighbors. The claim under test, though, was strong: that God was not mindful of him. Prayers still offered, songs that still landed, and a church member who refused to let him disappear fit comfortably with a God who was still near.
Why the logic does not end the grief
Rosiers drew the line himself between what he could reason through and what he felt. He could look at the times God had clearly shown up and see the logic. About his cousin, he still felt that “God performed malpractice.” Lisa Fields has described the same gap from her seminary years: she could explain the problem of evil in class, yet the explanation did not touch her emotionally until a professor admitted he wrestled too.
Showing that an inference is invalid does not return the porch or the conversation. Rosiers was mourning his cousin and also the future he had pictured for the two of them, a future he considered a godly vision. What the argument can do is remove a false accusation the loss seemed to make, against God and against his own place in God’s attention. The grief stays. The accusation does not have to.
Pencil, not pen
The warranted conclusion is modest: a good prayer can go ungranted while the One who heard it stays attentive, and God’s reasons may stay hidden.
Rosiers now speaks with hope about time revealing what God was doing and what he was protecting him from. That is his testimony about his own life, and it is worth hearing. It is not a guarantee that every reader will understand a particular loss before death; Scripture makes no such promise. His advice to his younger self may travel further. Of the dreams he once held with total confidence, he says, “you probably should have written in pencil instead of pen.” Pray boldly, and hold the specific outcome as a request rather than as a test of God’s love.
He also names the question that remains once the false inference is gone: “And when it doesn’t happen the way you want to, what is your response?” That question relocates the problem. It asks less about whether God was listening and more about whether we will keep trusting the One who was.