Not only has he offered you life but also he is keeping you in that same spiritual life. The Christian hope is not about making struggling people slightly more comfortable but about making spiritually dead people alive to God in Christ and keeping them there. This is his grace to us. We need ongoing protection after our conversion to keep us from falling into spiritual ruin.

I appreciated the moment of honesty. She said, half with anger and half with deep sadness, “Keep me? It feels more like he’s killing me!” I was talking with a young lady, Lisa, who had been struggling with her singleness for a long time. A number of times, she had a relation­ship that seemed to be working, but either she said or did something wrong, or the guy she was with just wasn’t the right one. She was beginning to wonder, Is this my lot?

She’d heard it said that it’s better to be left on the shelf than to be locked in the wrong cupboard, but right at that moment, being locked in the wrong cupboard was looking more appealing than life as it was. She was deeply saddened that she couldn’t find somebody to share her life with—someone who would be with her and care for her.

Many of her friends were getting married, but those weddings, where she was supposed to be happy for her friends, were moments of real sadness for her. She came to speak to me, trying to find a way through the strug­gle, and as you’d expect a pastor to do, I asked, “How is this affecting your spiritual life?” She was honest: “I’ve prayed about this for so many years now, and I can’t understand why God doesn’t hear me. Doesn’t he know what this is doing to me?” Of course, if you try to bring in spiritual wisdom and counsel too early in a conversation with somebody who is struggling, you invariably will say the wrong thing. And I did exactly that! I said, hopefully more gently than this, “The Lord is going to keep you through whatever your future holds, and right now, the Lord is keeping you.”

That’s when I heard her say this: “Keep me? It feels like he’s killing me.”

And there it was, a raw cry of desperation and accu­sation—a version of which may be the very reason that you have chosen to read this book. She had ridden the roller coaster of prayerful hopefulness and was now facing the chilling reality that our dreams for life do not always come true. It felt like a death. Why won’t God bring his power and potential in line with our solution to our pain—in line with what we want? That’s the kind of keeping power we are so often looking for.

Can You Be Kept and Killed at the Same Time?

It was plain that Lisa couldn’t see a way that both could be true—being kept and being killed at the same time. It seems unthinkable to consider that the Lord, in his eter­nal graciousness toward us, might be doing more for us by giving us less of what we want him to give. We find it hard to grapple with the notion that there are worse things that can happen to us than unanswered prayer.

Yet the apostle, as he shares his experience of very urgent, but unanswered, prayer with the Corinthian church, invites them to believe that the very thing he had prayed to be taken out of his life was being used for the greater pur­pose of keeping him for eternity. In the same way, we are invited not just to trust that he is always keeping us personally but even to pursue hope and comfort in that. Sometimes God, in unanswered prayer, is doing more for us than we can imagine.

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