The gray horse was never sold. It lived out its gentle days in the far paddock. And it was on that gray that Sarah learned to ride on the good mornings because mornings, as someone who had once lived in that house had rightly said, are too good to waste. And the lean gray dog that had growled once at the gate and then sat down to wait slept at the foot of Sarah's bed every night of its faithful life as though watching over this mended family were the one holy work it had been placed on the earth to do. Years later, when folks asked Ruth how she came to meet her husband, she told them about the gate and the sign that once said, "No God here."
And the broken man who, in the very minute a widow asked him only for a place to stay, asked her back, without meaning to, for the one thing far greater than shelter. And she always ended the same way. "People think faith is being certain God will do the thing you ask," she would say, her hand resting on that worn book. But it isn't. Faith is walking on down the road even when you're sure no one is listening because sometimes, far more often than you dare believe, the answer to the prayer you sobbed in the dark is already up ahead of you out mending a fence in the last of the light, just waiting on you to find the courage to push one more gate open.
That gate had meant one thing the day she came to it. Rejection, a curse, a locked and grieving heart. Then it had meant another, a frightened widow choosing against all her pride to walk through. And in the end it meant the truest thing of all, that God had been standing on the other side of it the whole time before either of them understood what he was doing. And I believe that is true, friend, not only for a widow and a rancher on the old Kansas frontier, but for you tonight, wherever you are sitting and listening to my voice.
Perhaps you're on a long road right now, carrying more than two hands were meant to hold, waiting on an answer that feels as though it is never going to come. Perhaps you have buried someone you do not know how to live without. Perhaps the house is quiet in a way it never used to be, and there is a chair at your table that no one fills, and you have begun to wonder in the long evenings whether your best years are behind you, and whether anyone still needs you at all. Perhaps you have prayed so long that you have started to fear the silence means he has stopped listening. Hear me, then.
And hear the whole of God's word behind me. He is a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows, and he sets the lonely in families. He has not forgotten you. He has never once forgotten you. His silence is not his absence.
Sometimes the answer to your prayer is already moving toward you while you are still grieving. And sometimes what looks to you like the end of your story is only the place where he is quietly beginning another chapter. So, do not give up before the next gate. You cannot yet see what is standing on the other side of it, but he can. And he is not finished with you.