“Why doesn’t God answer my prayers?” my first-grader recently asked.

It’s a question I’ve heard from my children before. A decade ago, when our 17- year-old son, Gabriel, was also in first grade, he faithfully asked God to help his little sister, Ruth, who had cerebral palsy, to walk and talk. I did too.

Day after day, it was crushingly painful to see those prayers seemingly go unanswered, and I struggled with what to say. “I don’t know,” I finally answered. “But I know God hears, and I know he wants us to keep praying.”

Now, faced with this same question again, I began to look at it from another angle. What if, God is answering our prayers, even when the results aren’t what we expect? Or we don’t fully see them fulfilled?

Say we pray for a friend’s healing, and they remain sick. Or we pray for God’s protection for those living in war-torn lands and the fighting continues. Or we pray for a sane solution to our country’s current political crisis?

How do we know that God isn’t actively answering our prayer by making the sickness less painful? Or by sparing many lives in the middle of great bloodshed? Or by using a potentially catastrophic presidential contest to highlight our need for him?

I often judge the effectiveness of my prayers – or God’s involvement in answering them – by what I see. What if, instead, I chose to believe based on what I don’t see?

“For now we see in a mirror dimly,” the apostle Paul wrote in I Corinthians 13:12, “but then [when we are finally with God], we shall see face to face.”

This is where faith comes in. Not ‘blind faith,’ as some have called it, but ‘believing faith’ – the kind found in Hebrews 11. Through faith, this passage says, the ancient people of God received approval; were blessed, counted as upright, and rescued from danger; obtained power; conquered kingdoms; and escaped death. The list goes on. Yet none of these great believers fully received what was promised.

“But from a distance they saw and greeted” the promised answers to their prayers, says verse 13.

It takes faith to keep praying when we don’t see the expected answer. With our limited knowledge, we glimpse such an infinitesimal part of God’s work. The only we to grasp the effectiveness of our prayers is through faith.

I am reminded of this as I work through the publishing process of releasing a book about Ruth, who never did walk and talk. Physically. Yet through her story, I see that she will now do both in a greater way than I ever imagined. So keep praying and believing. Greet the answers to your prayers from a distance. One day you will see God’s faithful answers to them all.

Meadow Rue Merrill writes and reflects on God’s presence in her everyday life from a little house in the big woods of Mid-coast Maine.

Her memoir, “Redeeming Ruth,” releases in May 2017. Find her at www.meadowrue.com