No Fear Because God Hears

by Jennifer Quan

Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard.” – Luke 1:13

What I love about this moment in Zechariah’s life is how unremarkable the setting seems. He isn’t crying out to God. He isn’t pleading for a miracle. He’s simply doing the work he knows to do – steady, faithful, reliable – when the angel suddenly names a prayer he had stopped bringing up.

“Your prayer has been heard.”

You can almost feel the surprise in the sentence. When a prayer is old enough, you learn to carry it quietly. Not to deny it, not to numb it – just to hold it with a kind of gentle caution. Waiting does that to a person.

Many of us have prayers like that. Not dramatic, not desperate – just honest longings we’ve tucked into the fabric of our lives. They sit there, steady but soft, shaping us more than we admit.

Earlier this year, I had a moment like that. Not a crisis, just a quiet truth rising to the surface. It happened after a long day when I came home and felt the familiar rhythm of being both independent and still living with my parents. I’m grateful for them. And I’m also aware of what it means to be a grown woman balancing responsibility, aging parents, launching sons, and the desire for a life that finally reflects the season I’m actually in.

I’m genuinely happy being single. I know who I am. I've done the work. My life is full, and I value the strength and freedom God has formed in me. But there’s also a part of me that would love to share real life with someone. Someone to laugh with at the end of the day, to sit in the quiet and know you’re both safe there. Someone who can move through the ordinary and the scared with me. Love lived out in the everyday – there’s a beauty in that I don’t ignore.

It’s not a dramatic longing – just a human one. And sometimes I forget it’s still there.

That’s right, I wasn’t praying about it. I wasn’t even thinking about it. I was putting things away in the kitchen, mentally organizing the next day, when the thought surfaced – not sad, not painful, just true: “It would be good to share this life with someone someday.”

And before I could brush it aside, I sensed something quiet but unmistakable, “I heard that.”

No promises.

No timelines.

No pressure.

Just acknowledgement. A reminder that God isn’t indifferent to the places where we stay strong. Or the longings we carefully carry. Or the hopes we believe in without letting them rule us.

That’s what Zechariah’s story tells us: Waiting doesn’t mean God is silent. Quiet prayers are still prayers. And longing doesn’t disqualify faith – sometimes it deepens it.

Advent invites us to bring even those soft, steady longings back into the light. Not to make demands, but to remember that God hears the prayers we whisper… and the ones we barely admit are still there.

Sometimes the holiest truth is simple: God hasn’t forgotten what you stopped saying out loud.