A Silent God
I question if God really hears me some days. I know that God is in all and hears all people, but I question if He hears me specifically. I’ve had euphoric experiences with God, strides of peace, and lasting moments of joy. Yet when the dust settles, the silence sets in, and it’s just me and God alone with one another, I begin to weep. I know what it’s like for God to love me and provide for me, but at my core I have a hesitancy. Because in the one prayer I wanted most of all to be answered, the one I truly believed would happen, God was yet to be found. I searched and found no sign. I listened and heard no response. It was as if the very person I had come to rely upon most had suddenly up and vanished in the dark of the night. So I began to put on a mask.
I smiled when I could, sounded spiritual when I had to, but within my soul was a deep sense of unrest. All I wanted was for God to save one person that wasn’t even me, but He had other plans. Over the course of the next few months, I began to pray more often despite it being the very place I had found complete desolation. Despite losing trust in God, I still believed He was somewhere to be found even within my midst. But a new hitch came about that I didn’t know how to get over, I lost the ability to use my own words in prayer. I would get stuck in a loop, repeat what others have said in my life, or just completely freeze. Yet at the same time I began to find new traditions that had guided prayers meant to aid you with your walk with God. I was mesmerized. By the sheer quantity of prayers collected by the saints from over two thousand years of church history.
As you continue reading, this will be a twofold adventure. One that explores the true emotions of grief and anguish I had with God and the other being how slow guided prayers became the balm I needed most. May these words bless you greatly.
A LONGING HEART
After the passing of a beloved family member, my heart was on a search again to find its fill. This felt all too familiar yet foreign. It brought me back to the same feeling I had when I was first discovering what it meant to know who God was. But this time was different. I knew all the clichés, what should cure my aching heart, yet actually taking the next step towards God felt too big to take.
So I opened up a psalm, and would read until my heart was content. Typically when I read the Bible I would do so to see how each book would intertwine with another, see how the meta narrative was being pulled and stretched, but with the psalms I was able to finally just read for the soul instead of just for the mind. To read words that echoed the cries of my heart like, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?”, “Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?”, “Give ear to my prayer, O God, and hide not yourself from my plea for mercy!” These were the prayers I needed to soothe my wounded soul. This language allowed me to see that genuine words to God were not something to be reprimanded for, but something that God actually desired from us. Over the years I had begun to put up this prim and proper veil around myself that only allowed God to receive my best rather than the real me. Because isn’t it better to give God our best rather than the reality of who we actually are?
Why would God want some arrogant, prideful, lazy, and often rude person when He could just get someone better? Why would God just not go for the cream of the crop of His creation? Because His love is predicated not on human exertion, but rather on divine benevolence. God loves not because of our actions and pleads but rather He loves simply because that’s who He naturally is. The love of God isn’t shared based on a certain criteria or perceived amount of holiness one can accumulate, it's shared lavishly upon all sinners and sufferers alike. It crosses all ethnic and national lines with no disparities. Best of all, it’s free. There is no cost to receive the love of God for eternity. Does this equate to an easy life or life void of strife or pain? No. But a life of being loved by God does mean that the inner woman or man inside of you will cease its search for belonging because it will have found its true rest in the heart of God.
Day by day this reality became alive to my eyes the more I searched God and His heart. I could see His love through the cotton candy skies He painted every week, His love shone bright over the expanse of the seas with all the arrays of fish and critters that inhabited the waters, yet even more so within my home. A tree that stretched out its limbs towards the sky as if to give praise to God, plants that bloom at just the right time to display the creativity of what God can do, and a bed to lay my head on so that I would rest peacefully every night while He watches over me like only a good Father could.
Am I completely restored and healed? Not quite. Do I trust God despite the mysteries of life? Absolutely. Because it’s in God that I know all good things find their source. Here’s my challenge for you. Where do you find yourself hesitating to trust God? Is it from a trauma yet to be walked through? A friendship crumbling you heavily relied upon? The silence of God finding you in times of sorrow? Whatever it may be, the only way towards restoration is through God. Slowly sitting with Him, listening to His words spill over you, allowing silence to not be a place to run away from but to be a place in which you find God and His love for you.
PRAYER
God, will you refresh my soul? The days are short and the nights are long and my heart continues to retreat back to a place of fear over love. But it’s you who stands above all because you are infinite. Infinitely holy, just, righteous, and lovely in all that you do and who you are in your essence. Yet even though I know this, my trust in you fails day in and day out. So will you draw me near again God? Embrace me like only you can so that my heart would remember what it means to truly be loved. It’s when I step into the true reality of God’s reign and rule that I will begin to understand that I’m a child of the one true king. Amen.