A woman once phoned a theatre to say she’d lost a valuable diamond brooch and thought it might have happened there the night before. The manager told her to hold the line while he went to look. He searched thoroughly and finally found the brooch lodged in a crack beneath her seat number. He raced back to the telephone only to find she’d hung up. She’d been so distraught that she couldn’t endure waiting any longer, and had gone on to call her next possibility. Sadly, she never called back, neither did she respond to a notice he placed in the newspaper.
She reminds me of how we often are in our prayers. We tell God our needs, but in our anxiety we fail to hold the line if the answer is delayed. That’s why Jesus taught that we should be persistent in our prayers. ‘Ask’ he said, ‘And keep on asking.’