Is it just dead ground?
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A mother of four sleeps alone in her bed, though her husband’s snores could raise the dead from their graves. He’s there, but he’s not really there. She’s learned to raise the children the best she can on her own and takes them and herself to church with faithfulness every week. Every day, she cries out to God: “Please, save my marriage. I know you want it to thrive. Divorce is not in the cards with you.”
But she and her husband divorce. God did not come through, she feels. Did he disappear off the scene?
Where was God when she needed him to answer?
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A young evangelical raised in the church can’t make sense of what she hears others say: “God spoke to me.” “God told me.” “I felt God’s presence.” “God put his arms around me.”
Who is this God who speaks? This God who puts his arms — such a comfort — around us? She has never known him. Never heard him. Never felt him. Never even sensed him. She’s done all the things she’s been taught to do: She’s prayed. Read her Bible. Showed up for church. Led groups. Served on mission trips.
Has God abandoned her? Did he go rogue? Slip off the grid?
Where is God?
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As we approach the season of Advent — a time to celebrate “God came near” — let’s first make room for the reality of our experience of God’s seeming silence in our lives. What it is like to live with such silence? What’s really happening in those voids?
The intertestamental time was like this. Four hundred years of seeming silence from God. This God who had promised a messiah. This God who had prized Israel as his own. He’d gone off the scene. Left Israel to fend for herself.
Where was God?
—
It seems God was there, but in a cosmically different way than they’d ever known or thought to expect. He was working underneath the ground. No sprouts seen yet above the surface. No sprigs of green pushing through the soil.
It happened in the dark.
And then God showed up on a silent night in a barn in the form of a baby. God came near … this way?
Perhaps when God goes silent or absent from his post, hope is to be found in new places. Or in trusting he’s just “posting” someplace new and that we’ll find him in that new post in the fullness of time.
Isn’t that what Advent is? God showing up in places unexpected? God “posting” someplace new?
How have you experienced God’s absence in your life? What did you learn about God “posting” someplace new through it?
Not a fun topic, really, is it? And yet, a necessary one. If we are to be honest in our deep seeking after the biblical God then we cannot simply affix Alice in Wonderland characteristics to that God. We must allow God to be who God is. Jesus brings God close to us. But, at the end of it all, God is still God, we are not and, even in Christ, there is so much experiential open ground we have yet to cover. God’s absence in one way is our invitation into Jesus’ Psalm 22 cry from the cross, “God, O God, why have you forsaken me?” Look what came from that “forsakenness.” The salvation of the world!
Whew! That’s deep, Rob! Salvation through forsakenness. As gritty and detestable as that idea feels, it’s also somehow comforting.
I have people in my life who are continually reminding me of the Paschal mystery: resurrection comes from the tomb. God is about resurrection in us, but it means we first have to die. Yowza.
Christianne,
You portray well, the real stories of what it must feel like for some to experience the absence of God. Some may not even be able to name that. Perhaps we might state it as a deep ache, an addiction, a buried trouble or a betrayal, to name a few. Your words “Perhaps when God goes silent or absent from his post, hope is to be found in new places”, are arrows to a truth that often goes unnoticed. We look for God in the post and then we hang on to whatever we see. But God is not stagnant and we are often blind. His presence moves and expands faster than time and yet his essence never changes. Maybe we might become more aware of God if we only stopped and listened from within. Or maybe we might do as well by pausing to notice God without. Where can we escape his presence but only within our own meager understandings all which lack the true mystery of the faith. Yes, God is always about resurrecting our thinking, our clutches of safety and our propensity to despair at whatever levels necessary for us to truly experience his goodness, beauty and truth. Until then, we wait.
You are so wise. I’m glad you’re my friend.
She is rather clever, isn’t she? You’re both good people to know, especially when it comes to living the spiritual life in community!
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