What to Do When Your Prayers Feel Like Voicemails to Heaven

"And He was saying, 'Abba! Father! All things are possible for You; remove this cup from Me; yet not what I will, but what You will.'" - Mark 14:36 (NASB)

For eight months, I left God voicemails. Daily, desperate messages that seemed to echo back from an empty universe. "Please call me back," I'd whisper into the silence. "I really need to know you're there."

The crisis that landed me in this spiritual phone booth doesn't matter much—we all have our own version of the thing that breaks us open and leaves us questioning whether anyone is listening. What matters is the soul-deep exhaustion that comes from praying to what feels like a disconnected number.

Maybe you know this place. Where prayer feels less like conversation and more like talking to yourself. Where the God who once seemed so present now feels absent, disinterested, or worse—fictional. Where your faith feels like a childhood imaginary friend you've finally outgrown.

But look at Jesus in that garden. Even He experienced the silence. Even He prayed prayers that seemed to go unanswered. The Son of God Himself left what felt like voicemails to heaven: "Remove this cup from me." And then waited in the dark for a response that never came—at least not in the way He asked for it.

Anne Lamott writes, "The worst thing about prayer is that we do it." But she also says, "The best thing about prayer is that we do it." The value isn't always in the immediate response—it's in the persistent act of reaching out, even when our hands seem to grasp only air.

What if your prayers aren't going to voicemail? What if the silence isn't absence but presence so vast you can't recognize it yet? What if God's response isn't always words but the mysterious grace that somehow keeps you praying even when it feels pointless?

I still don't hear back from my prayers the way I'd like. But I've learned something in those months of spiritual phone calls: the voicemails we leave might not get the responses we expect, but they change us in the leaving. They keep our hearts soft, our spirits reaching, our souls open to mystery.

Keep leaving those messages. Not because you'll always get the call back you want, but because the act of reaching out is itself a form of faith—faith that somewhere in the vast silence, love is listening.