When God Goes Silent

When God goes silent – it can be frustrating, painful, and challenging to our faith.

I remember a time when God went silent. I was sitting in Adoration, my frequent place of prayer, asking hard questions, and getting no response from the Lord. No whisper, inkling, or nudge. I felt every emotion from frustration to sadness to boredom. I didn’t know the path forward and there was no answer.

God’s silence, and patience through that silence, is so difficult sometimes in our prayer and faith lives. For days, weeks, months and sometimes even years, we may pray and not get answers to our deepest life questions. We may only get silence as we are listening for the will of God in our lives. We may have to wander in the dark and take each day and moment as it comes. As Andrew Peterson writes in his song “The Silence of God” …

It's enough to drive a man crazy, it'll break a man's faith
It's enough to make him wonder, if he's ever been sane
When he's bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod
And the Heaven's only answer is the silence of God

It'll shake a man's timbers when he loses his heart
When he has to remember what broke him apart
This yoke may be easy but this burden is not
When the crying fields are frozen by the silence of God

And the man of all sorrows, he never forgot
What sorrow is carried by the hearts that he bought
So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God
The aching may remain but the breaking does not
In the holy lonesome echo of the silence of God.
(Andrew Peterson “The Silence of God”)

Spiritual writers say that God works most in the silence of our lives. When we can’t hear Him, when He feels unresponsive, and when it feels most dead and dark in our prayer lives, He is transforming us. Slowly but surely, answers do come, and we change more closely into His image.

All the while, it may feel like nothing is happening. In the deadness, nothingness, silence, and stillness, sit in His presence and wait. Transformation happens, answers percolate, and pain gives birth in the silence of God.