Dear friend,
I want to tell you about a night I have never written about before.
Not because I forgot it. I remember every detail of it. The time on the clock. The sound of the building settling in the cold. The specific weight of the silence in the room.
I have not written about it because it is the kind of night that a man in my position is not supposed to admit to having. The kind that does not fit the image of the calm, steady, unshakeable faith that people expect from someone who has been with the Church for fifty years.
But I am an old man. And old men who keep waiting for the right moment to say the true things eventually run out of moments.
So tonight I am telling you about that night.
It was winter. I do not remember the exact year. What I remember is that I had been praying for something specific for a very long time. Years. The kind of prayer you bring to God every morning without fail. The kind you have prayed so many times that the words have worn smooth from use. The kind you have built your hope around in a way that you only fully realize when the hope starts to crack.
And that night it cracked.
Not dramatically. Not with anger or tears or any of the things you might imagine. Just a quiet, cold, settling certainty that the room was empty. That the words I had been saying every morning for years had been going nowhere. That the God I had been speaking to had either not been listening or had decided that what I was asking for was not something He was going to give.
I got on my knees anyway. Because fifty years of habit is stronger than one night of doubt. But I want to be honest with you. I did not feel anything. The room felt exactly as empty as it would have felt if God did not exist.
And I stayed there for a long time in that emptiness. Not because it felt good. Because I did not know what else to do.
I want to tell you what I did after I got up off my knees.
I opened my Bible. Not to a passage I had chosen. I let it fall open. I know that sounds superstitious for a man of my training. I do not care. It is what I did.
It fell open to First Kings chapter 19.
Elijah under the juniper tree.
I have read that passage hundreds of times. I have preached from it. I have quoted it at bedsides. I thought I knew everything it had to say to me.
But that night I read it differently.
Elijah had just come off the greatest victory of his ministry. Fire from heaven on Mount Carmel. The prophets of Baal defeated. The crowd finally turning back to God. Everything he had worked for and prayed for coming true in a single afternoon.
And then a message arrived from Queen Jezebel saying she was going to kill him.
And Elijah ran.
Not walked. Ran. Into the wilderness. A day's journey in. And then he sat down under a tree and asked God to let him die.
It is enough he said. Take my life.
The man who had just called down fire from heaven was sitting under a tree in the desert asking God to let him die.
Here is what God did.
He did not rebuke him. He did not remind him of the victory on Mount Carmel. He did not give him a theological argument for why his feelings were wrong.
He let him sleep.
And then an angel touched him and said get up and eat.
Get up and eat. That is all. No sermon. No explanation. No answer to the question of why things had gone wrong so quickly after going so right.
Just bread. Baked on hot coals. And a jar of water.
And when Elijah had eaten and slept and eaten again the angel said the journey is too much for you.
The journey is too much for you.
Not you are weak. Not you should be stronger than this. The journey is too much for you. As if God's response to Elijah's exhaustion was simply to acknowledge that it was real and that what he needed before anything else was rest and food and the knowledge that he was not expected to be stronger than he actually was.
I want to tell you what happened when I read that on that empty winter night.
Something shifted.
Not dramatically. Not with a feeling of warmth or presence or the specific comfort I had been asking for. Something quieter than that. The specific recognition that the emptiness I was feeling was not evidence that God had left. It was evidence that I was tired. That the journey had been too much for a while and I had not admitted it.
And somewhere in that recognition was the beginning of something that felt, if not like faith exactly, then like the thing that faith is made of when feeling is gone.
The willingness to get up and eat. To stay at the table even when the room feels empty. To keep showing up not because it feels like anything but because fifty years of showing up has taught me that the feeling is not the thing. The showing up is the thing.
I want to tell you why I am sharing this on a Friday evening.
Because I know some of you are in that winter night right now.
Not all of you. But some of you. The ones who have been praying for something specific for a long time and have started to wonder in the quiet moments whether any of it is reaching anyone. The ones who have been faithful in ways that have not produced the results they hoped for. The ones for whom the room has gone quiet in a way that is starting to feel permanent.
I want you to know that I have been in that room.
And I want you to know that the emptiness was not the end of the story.
I also want to tell you something about the wider moment we are all living through.
Because the same feeling — the sense that God has gone quiet, that the prayers are not landing, that the things we have been fighting for are slipping away despite everything — is not just a personal experience right now. It is a shared one.
I have been watching what is happening in this country with the eyes of a man who has read this Book every morning for fifty years. And I have come to believe that what looks like absence is often preparation. That what feels like God going quiet is often God doing something in the background that will only be visible in hindsight.
The God who let Elijah sleep under a juniper tree before sending him back into the most important assignment of his life is the same God who is present in what you are watching happen right now. Not absent. Working. On a timeline you cannot see from where you are standing.
I wrote all of this down in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. Not just the pattern of opposition and survival. The specific Biblical case that what looks like God going quiet is often the moment right before He moves most decisively. Read it this week if you have not. I believe it will do for you what First Kings chapter 19 did for me on that empty winter night. Not answer all the questions. Give you enough to get up and eat and keep going. You can find it by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Get up and eat, friend.
The journey is too much for you right now. That is not a failure. That is an honest acknowledgment of what faithfulness costs when it goes on long enough without the results you hoped for.
God saw Elijah under that tree. He sees you tonight. And His response is the same.
Not a sermon. Not a rebuke. Bread. Water. Rest.
And then — when you are ready — the next assignment.
You are not finished. The story is not finished. The empty room is not the last chapter.
Get up and eat.
God bless you, friend. I am glad you are still here.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
This weekend I want you to do two things:
One. Read First Kings chapter 19 verses 1 through 18 this weekend. The whole section. Pay attention to what God does before He speaks. Pay attention to the still small voice that comes after the wind and the earthquake and the fire. Let it be what it was designed to be — permission to be exhausted without being faithless.
Two. Read They Tried To Stop Him this weekend: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I wrote it for the people who are tired of carrying something heavy without being able to see whether any of it is working. It will not make the journey lighter. But it will help you see where the journey is going.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.