It can be really difficult to hold onto our faith when we are confronted with what seems to be God’s silence.
God’s Silence on Easter Saturday
On Easter Saturday there is the space between death and life, between crucifixion and resurrection. We often pass over the day quite quickly. Few people spend time mourning on Holy Saturday. Sometimes we might try and enter into the reality that the first disciples experienced. But most of us I imagine just get on with life while we wait for Easter Sunday to come along.
But there is something about Holy Saturday which we may well experience. That is silence.
I often find that God is silent. When I pray, when I read the Bible, when I think about God, I often only get silence back. I very rarely have any kind of experience of God. When they come they are profound but fleeting. But for me, my experience of God is far more frequently marked by silence.
We Can’t Depend on Feelings
How you maintain your faith without those experiences? For me, it’s one of the reasons why I am so hesitant and often critical of people’s who belief in God is so dependent on a personal experience of God. What happens if that experience goes away? What happens to your faith if suddenly we are exposed to what seems to be God’s silence?
There are times when I am envious of those people who can feel God or hear God close to them on a regular basis. The people who can lose themselves in worship or be transcendent in prayer. When I am confronted by the silence of my faith I sometimes wish to hear something, to feel something, to experience something.
But then I come back to Easter Saturday. Because so much of life is like Holy Saturday. Lived between death and life. Lived between the promise of glory but the delay in experiencing it. Moving from one place to another through a veil and under a shadow.
For me, the silence of God in my life does not reduce my faith. It does not lesson my experience of God. It does not cheapen my displeship.
God’s Silence Means Living in the World as it is
God’s silence compels me to live in the world as it is, not as I would have it. The silence of God demands that I do not rely on pie in the sky to solve my problems but contend and wrestle with life in a way which recognises my own responsibility. The silence of God means that my trust and dependence upon God is offered not as a result of a daily presence but out of faith and hope.
Most importantly, the silence of God means that faith is a choice that I make. I chose to believe in Jesus. Those experiences I have had underpin my choice and give evidence to my faith, but my faith is not dependent upon those experiences. If I never again had an experience of God I would still believe. Because I choose to have faith in Jesus.
Silence Isn’t Absence
The silence of God is not absence. It is the deep and attentive silent presence of the God who does not have to shout, but who gives me the space to grow up and be free. The silence of God does not mean that God is not there. Only that I need to look in a different place.
I love the silence of God because it makes everything else sing more clearly and means, on those times when I hear God, that it resonates all the more profoundly.
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