Psalms 120:1. In my distress I cried unto the Lord, and he heard me.

In our distress we often call on the Lord.  At times we lose faith that He hears us.  We can rest assured that He hears according to the promise in this verse.  The question is whether He responds in the way we want Him to.  Often the Lord hears just fine.  He is not deaf.  The issue is our faith, to trust Him with the outcome of our request.  We pray to the Lord and seek His direction on many different things in life.  The issue is this is not our life.  It is His.  Our will is not going to line up with God’s will a lot of the time.  We just need to let Him do what He wants.

The other issue is often we are not in earnest when we make a request unto the Lord.  When David called on the Lord, it was in “distress”.  He was usually in the middle of a fire fight, in a cave running from someone, or in some other calamity when many of the Psalms were penned.  We often need to get some desperation about us before the Lord will listen to us. That desperation is produced by trial and afflictions in our life.  We look at the afflictions as bad, but in reality, they are the very thing that allows God to listen to us and answer our prayers. 

We need to trust God through it all.  He listens to our prayers and uses the trials of our life to get us to pray earnestly.  God wants to produce good in our life.  He wants to accomplish His pleasure using our lives.  He is going to have to put you through some distress to make that happen.  When it does and God delivers, He will get all the glory.