The Silence of God

Have you ever felt abandoned by God?

Have you felt that He hasn’t heard your prayers or He doesn’t want to help you or that He is unaware of how much you hurt?

It isn’t an uncommon feeling. If you are someone who prays, the prayers at such times seem like strange things. How does a person pray to God when there doesn’t seem to be any response? What is your prayer like when instead of praying in the quiet of God you feel you are praying in the silence of God?

You aren’t alone.

Job felt like that:

"Only grant me these two things, O God,
and then I will not hide from you:

Withdraw your hand far from me,
and stop frightening me with your terrors.

Then summon me and I will answer,
or let me speak, and you reply..."

--Job 13:20-22

He was praying for his misery to stop and for God to respond to his suffering.

Is this how you have felt? Have you felt that you are alone in your pain and that no one, not even the Lord God who is supposed to be merciful and loving, is aware of what you are going through? How do your prayers feel to you when you are in such situations? Frustrated? Confused?

King David felt like that:

How long, O LORD ? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;

my enemy will say, "I have overcome him,"
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing to the LORD,
for he has been good to me.

--Psalm 13

Now there is an interesting twist. In the midst of his anguish, within his fear and troubles, he still praises God. He still let God know he wanted an answer, a response, not the continuing silence of a divinity giving no indication of hearing the plaintive cry.

It is wonderful that David still found room in his heart to praise God in the midst of his troubles. I think it pleases God when we continue to find room for praise, even when the giving of such praise is a painful thing.

It isn’t unreasonable to cry out to God in frustration.

Consider this prayer:

From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" —which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

--Matthew 27:45-46

Even the Son of God felt abandoned.

Did you know Jesus wasn’t praying spontaneously there? He was quoting scripture:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, and am not silent.

Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;
you are the praise of Israel.

--Psalm 22:1-3

I have felt like this. The first post of this blog ends with a surprising answer to such a prayer.

I think you may have felt like this too.

It is common.

What are we to make of the suffering of humanity? What are we to make of prayers that go unanswered?

I have a friend, a good friend, who is praying for me. He has been praying for me for some time. He points out the passages in scripture, especially in the book of Mark, of how the Lord wants to heal us, to make us whole. He suggests that we are not designed to suffer, that the Lord wants healing for each and every one of us.

Perhaps.

He has been praying for my psoriasis. I have a skin condition which reddens, and itches, and flakes and cracks and splits. My hands bleed. The skin splits open. The rash on my ankle chafes under my sock. My scalp flakes, and itches, and the hair hides little sores. The skin flakes and sloughs off between my toes.

My friend believes I am to be healed of this.

Perhaps. I am willing to pray along with him.

My friend’s wife is especially prayerful. She is a prayer warrior who holds my family up in prayer and asks the Lord for blessings. For my health, for the spiritual protection of my children. There is good reason to believe that the darkness from which we plucked our children (Haiti) chases after them still.

I eagerly join my friends in these prayers, for the protection of my family. I pray for them every day. I pray over them each night. I pray for them as I slip into my own sleep. Every night. Every day. Whether I feel the connection to God or not.

Has there been a direct response? Maybe. I think things are better than they have been. (I need to post about Jeremiah's recent progress.)

My wife is praying for me right now. Many of you are also. There is something strange going on with my left arm. The neurologist hints that it may have been a small stroke, a bizarre thing to happen to a fifty year old.

The doctors do not know what it is. I don’t blame them at all. The more I learn about the human body the more amazed I am. I do not think that any man can fully understand it all. I suppose that is why they say doctors practice medicine. They never fully know it all, so they practice.

But I am patient with my situation. (Ha! I’m a patient patient!)

The implication of my friend's statement is the Lord wants me healed, but I am getting in the way of that healing. That may be true. The sin in my life might be preventing the Lord from working fully to heal me.

But I think: it isn’t as simple as that.

What of hurricane Katrina? What of the misery of that event? All those people, crying out for for help. Thousands homeless. Hom many dead? How many missing? How many families disrupted and grieving? Does the Lord God hear those prayers?

Consider December 24, 2004. A tremendous earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean caused over 275,000 deaths. More than a quarter of a million people simply washed away. The Lord promised not to destroy all the world in a flood, but for many in that corner of our planet it seemed to be the whole world.

Staggering.

It casts Hurricane Katrina into a much smaller category of misery.

There are worse situations. In the 13th century the world went through “The Little Ice Age.”

At the end of the Dark Ages, following the Fall of the Roman Empire, the peasant population in Europe had grown from 20 million to 60 million. People all over the world had moved into marginal areas. And the climate shifted. For three centuries.

Infant mortality climbed to 50%. Try to imagine that much sorrow. I lost a child once. It hurt so badly, the ache in my heart still throbs distantly.

It grew wet and cold during those three centuries. People crowded together, becoming prime targets for all sorts of disease. The worst was bubonic plague. But there was malaria, and ergot poisoning, and all the other diseases bourne of rotting crops and corpses.

There was malnutrition. There was starvation. The story of Hansel and Gretel has its roots in the abandonment of children of this period (so others would have enough to eat). Imagine the misery! Life expectancies plummeted. Thousands were killed as witches (for bringing the bad weather). By the time it was over Europe's population was halved.

Where was God? Millions of people died slow painful deaths. Over those three centuries how many people died of plague and starvation and tuberculosis? Forty million? Sixty million? The population when it was over was half of what it was. How many suffered just long enough to have children, and left orphans behind?

It is easy to speak of natural processes. It is easy to speak of the carbon cycle of trees and the balancing act of ecosystems. It is easy to say the Earth’s environmental health is kept vital by the replenishing of materials in the crust caused by the tectonic plates moving beneath us. But it does not comfort a child who’s mother has perished along with everyone else in the village when the ocean stood up and strode over the land.

I’m not wise enough to have the answers to such questions.

But I know something that goes beyond my understanding of history and geology and ecosystems. I know, with a certainty that surpasses my belief that I have two eyes to see my world, and two hands to hold my wife, that the Lord God Almighty is a loving, caring, powerful God.

We pray because there is something within us that recognizes the truth of the spiritual realm. We pray for each other. We pray with each other. We make prayer our vocabulary to each other:

Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

--Ephesians 5:19-20

So how are we to pray when terrible things happen?

We pray as we should always pray: with open honesty. We pray the prayers of fear. We pray the prayers of questions, and even the prayers of accusations. We pray the prayers of abandonment and confusion. We pray who we are, where we are.

We pray with praise, even if the giving gives us pain.