You prayed and nothing changed

You asked. Properly, and more than once, in the plainest language you had, for the situation to lift. It did not. The same thing sits in the same place this morning as it did the morning you first asked, and what you feel about it now is not really doubt. It is embarrassment. A small hot feeling about having hoped in front of somebody, even in private, and having nothing at all to show for it. So you stopped asking, mostly to protect yourself from doing that again.

There are two different things you can be given and they get confused constantly. One is rescue. The other is company. You asked for the first, and you have been assuming the silence means you received neither. But look at what you have actually been doing since. You have been getting up. You have been going in. You have stayed free through a stretch you would not have survived free two years ago. Something has been holding the floor up, and it has not been the situation improving, because the situation has not improved.

That is worth being precise about, because it is easy to walk straight past. The circumstance is unchanged and you are not. You are carrying the same weight with a different spine. Nobody sends a notification when that happens. It shows up as the fact that you cried on Tuesday and still made dinner, that the thing which once cost you a week now costs you an evening. The prayer answered slowly gets answered in you first. It is the least dramatic form of help and by some distance the most useful.

So keep the ritual running, and shrink it until it costs you nothing. Thirty seconds at the same moment each day. Not a request this time, just showing up in the direction you had turned away from. A line you keep open on the days it seems pointless is the only kind that is there when it stops seeming pointless. You were not foolish for asking. You are someone who asked, and got company, and has not recognized it yet. Ask again tonight anyway.