When God is Silent

There are troubling days when we search for answers and God seems to be silent. We pray and we call on him, but the heavens are still. Sometimes we get the impression from preachers and other Christians that there is a simple formula for getting answers to prayer. We have come to believe that we shouldn’t have to struggle for solutions or wait for our miracle. But life doesn’t always operate that way, and that can be unsettling.

Peter Greig writes on this in his book God On Mute:

Although seasons in our lives when God is silent may be important to our spiritual growth, they can also be deeply disturbing. As a result, we often attempt to solve the problem of God’s silence with simplistic explanations of complex situations, lopsided applications of Scripture and platitude of premature comfort. We are afraid to simply wait in the mess of problems unresolved until God Himself unmistakably intervenes, as He did on Easter Sunday. We are unwilling to admit, ‘I don’t have a clue what God is doing or why this is happening.’ We may even suspect that it would be un-Christlike to cry out publicly, ‘My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?’ Why can’t we wait with the mess and pain of Holy Saturday unresolved?

Why can’t we wait? Because that’s hard work and makes us very uncomfortable. It can be confusing. I don’t like it either. The reality is there will be times in our Christian walk when we have some Holy Saturdays. It is important to remember that God has not disappeared nor is he uninterested. He just isn’t working according to our schedule. If that’s where you are, may he give you grace to endure. Don’t give up.

“For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.(Romans 15:4)