The Blessing of the Silence of God
Planting a church is a trying time. Some weeks I feel like I’m walking on top of the world, and others I feel lower than any other time in my life. In a very real sense its like experiencing spiritual warfare on the front line, feeling the high of every blow to the enemy and being knocked back each time he retaliates.
Because of the spiritual nature of all of this there are many times when I just feel like God is silent. These are the times that we have all had; we cry out but feel that our prayer is muffled at best. We pray but feel that the words hardly leave our lips, so how can they ever get to the heart of God? These are the times that St. John of the cross called “the dark night of the soul.” A time when God is silent and we feel helpless.
But, there is more hope than we can possibly imagine. In Prayer, Richard Foster writes:
If we could make the Creator of heaven and earth instantly appear at our beck and call, we would not be in communion with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We do that with objects, with things, with idols. But God, the great iconoclast, is constantly smashing our false images of who he is and what he is like.
Can you see how our very sense of the absence of God is, therefore, an unsuspected grace? In the very act of hiddenness God is slowly weaning us of fashioning him in our own image. Like Aslan, the Christ figure in The Chronicles of Narnia, God is wild and free and comes at will. Be refusing to be a puppet on our string or a genie in our bottle, God frees us from our false, idolatrous images.
I thank God that He comes at will and in power. I thank God that He loves me enough to wean me of my tendency to take Him for granted. I thank God that He loves me enough to bring me through every trial.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:02 am
[...] goes along with some of the thoughts I wrote about the other day on the blessing of the silence of God. I’ve been here in my prayer life before, though I’ve never really thought of it as [...]