Waiting on God in the "Silent Years"

This morning at church, Pastor made an interesting observation: after Joseph’s lifetime, there was nothing recorded in Israel’s history for about 400 years. He posed the question, “Was God at work during those silent years?” His answer and mine is a resounding “Yes!”, but the fact remains that, historically speaking, while God was at work, He did not see fit to record any of His working during that period, making it easy to see that period as unimportant or insignificant.

Yet, if you know the Lord as I do, you know that He is ever present with His children. Even during those silent times, He would have been at work in millions of ways every day that encouraged the faithful among the Israelites. They may have been living in a “silent” period, waiting, watching, longing for the deliverance God had promised at the end of the 400 years, but God saw, God heard, and God loved them. He was present with them and purposeful in what He allowed, using even the difficulty of the years in slavery to prepare His people for the blessings to come. After all, if Egypt had been a place of freedom and prosperity, they would not have wanted to follow Moses across the wilderness --even for a land flowing with milk and honey.

 God often allows seasons of difficulties to make us willing to accept the blessings He has prepared for us later on. 

And those difficulties are sometimes “silent years” in our lives. They may span days, weeks, months, or years. They are periods of seemingly unimportant slogging along, not sure if we are accomplishing anything meaningful. Those are the times when one can doubt that God is at work. You may feel forgotten or left out as friends move freely down the pathways God has for them, as you stay still, seemingly stuck in a muddy patch on yours. But even in the muddy spots, God is there. Look for Him in the silence. Seek Him in the struggle. 

Let me tell you a story to illustrate. Once there was a young teen-aged girl who just might have been me. She lived out her Junior High years in an imaginary world of her own making, always imagining a different life, with different circumstances and different people.

 In High School, she began to grow up and somehow knew God wanted her to begin living in reality instead of trying to escape the ordinary, every-day life He had given her. As she looked around her, though, she realized that she was lonely. She had family who loved her, and she had friends she saw once in a while, but there was still something missing. 

She began to seek the Lord, beginning again to read through her Bible and, for the first time, praying regularly. She would get up very early and sit by the window of her upstairs bedroom like a princess in a tower, but instead of imagining a prince charming emerging from amongst the apple trees, she now began to revel in the beauty of her moment-by moment reality: the way the light painted the leaves, how lovely the gentle breeze was that blew in from the open window, the joyful sound of robins singing as if to celebrate the new day, the truths she was learning as she sat there reading God’s Word. 

After a while, she began to realize that God was showing His love to her every day in small, sweet, thoughtful ways. Sometimes it was sending a bird to sing to her on a particularly dreary day, another time it was a yard full of her favorite flowers which she had never noticed before, even though she walked past it nearly every day. Another time a whole string of traffic stopped to let her across the street when she wasn’t feeling well but had to walk to piano lessons anyway.

Bit by bit, she began to see God at work and the more she saw His love, the more she looked for Him. And the more she looked for Him, the more she found Him, right there, showing His love for her again and again. And soon her loneliness began to lessen, and she began to find that God is enough, even for the routine of daily life during a seemingly insignificant and unimportant season of life.

I won’t say that the girl was never lonely again, or that she always had that sense of closeness to the Lord every minute of the rest of her life, but I will say that whether or not she saw it at the time, God has always been right there with her, showing His love just the same whether or not she thought to look for it. 

“Draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you” James 4:8a

Finding God to be Enough in Times of Grief

Grief is difficult to describe. I have heard it likened to drowning, and the adjective “overwhelming” has been among the most common I have heard used to describe the emotional turmoil of loss. But how can one adequately describe such a powerful feeling? 

I attended a memorial service for a beloved uncle last week, and I must admit, I couldn’t think of a better way of describing grief than the definition the pastor used: that grief is a hole in one’s heart that is carried with us for the rest of our lives. 

I cried at my uncle’s service, as I have cried over the loss of other relatives: not because of any sadness for them, (they are enjoying the glories of heaven!) but because a part of my heart is empty. 

I have found that grief is not the all-consuming pit of despair I had expected it to be when viewing it through the eyes of childhood. It is more like a flash flood. It comes powerfully, in waves. 

When my Gramma died (my first “real” experience with grief), I cried a great deal in the first few days, but even during that first intense period of grief, the waves would come and go. It was not a steady stream of sorrow; and even now there are times when I see a picture of her, or hear someone say something she often said, or smell the scent of the hairspray she used, and all at once I feel that emptiness acutely and the flood of grief washes over me anew. 

For me, these floods are usually caused by or at least strengthened or prolonged by “nevermore” thoughts. For example, the day my uncle was put on hospice, Mommy asked me to bake a small apple pie for my uncle. I was happy to do so, but as I prepared to bake, I found myself overwhelmed with grief as the same idea raced again and again through my mind:

His last pie. 

 The last pie I will ever make him.

The last pie he will ever get to eat.

As it turned out, he actually never got to eat the pie I made; he went to heaven the next morning before the pie could be delivered.  But I think God intended the making of the pie to benefit me more than my uncle anyway. It made me come to terms with the reality of the coming loss before it was upon me.

When my Gramma died, the “nevermore” thought that was on auto repeat through my head as I drove home from the hospital (and many times after that) was that she never got to see me in a wedding dress. Oh, how she would have loved to! She delighted to see her grandkids all dressed up, and I used to stop by to see her whenever there was an occasion to dress up for. Several times in the first year after she went to heaven, I had the thought as I got ready for some special occasion, “I should stop by to see Gramma afterwards” and was struck with the thought that I never could do that again.

But despite these oh-so-poignant “nevermores”, I have found that God is enough, even in grief. In every area of loss, whether it be loss of our dearest people or dreams or health or plans of how our lives “should” be, God’s character never changes, and Romans 8:28 still applies.

In my few sorrows, I have learned that dealing with grief and loss is just like dealing with any other area of aching emptiness: the answer is surrender.

Now, before you tune me out for being unfeeling, know that I do acknowledge that grief is real, raw, and powerful. To say that the answer is surrender in no way diminishes the reality of grief. But God is as His Word says, “a very present help in trouble”. In fact, Psalm 46, the first verse of which contains that wonderful truth of God’s presence and support in trouble, goes on to describe earthquakes and mountains melting into the ocean and angry waves shaking even the mountains. Yet, the very next thought is “There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.” (v.4) There is comfort to be found, yes and even gladness in the midst of such turmoil. The way to such peace and joy is found in verse 10: “Be still, and know that I am God”

The problem with my “nevermore” thoughts is that they presume to pass judgement on how things “should have been”, instead of accepting how God has allowed them to be.

It has well been said that “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”[i] But God is the Master of our reality. In times of grief, when the billows of sorrow and floods of “nevermores” overwhelm us, the choice to trust in God’s character and wisdom is crucial.

Think of Job. He suffered loss most of us will never come near to experiencing, but even in those first moments of grief and agony, he responded in a way God describes as being without sin.

Here is Job’s response: 

“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21)

These words have been quoted and held up as an example to suffering people ever since Job’s story was first told, but I want you to notice God’s view of them. The very next verse clearly states why it was that Job’s response was right:

“In all this, Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.” (Job 1:22)

Here’s where it hits me the hardest: Those “nevermores” I so readily wallow in are nothing more than thinly veiled complaints about what God has allowed. In other words, I am foolishly charging God with incompetence or negligence at best, and malice at worse. After all it is God’s “good and perfect” will we are arguing with. (Romans 12:2)

Godly grief acknowledges sorrow and the feelings of loss, but chooses gratitude over complaint, humble trust over bitterness, and hope over despair.

God has designed us to feel those empty places. But the reason He wants us to notice them is so that He can fill them. When my heart feels hollow, I must choose to cry out to God, for Scripture promises: “draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you.” (James 4:8) When I yield my sorrow and hurt to Him, I never cease to find that He is enough.

---

[i] John Greenleaf Whittier, “Maud Muller”

Casting out Fear

For many years now, I have struggled with fear. As a child, I was afraid of literally everything. Whether it was spiders, flies (they sounded like bees), the faucet that resembled a face, or the coat rack in the hallway which terrorized me in nightmares throughout my childhood; you name it, I was probably afraid of it. 

As I have grown and matured, my list of things that terrify me has shrunk considerably, but as I stare the possibility of living on my own squarely in the face, there is one fear I simply must conquer. --I absolutely dread being in the house by myself after dark. 

Now, being a grown-up sort of person, it does happen that I am at home by myself after dark periodically, and I have improved some since that first time when my parents were called away to the hospital and I stayed awake in terror all night till they got back. And it’s not as if I have any traumatic experience of bad things happening when I have stayed alone before. –I just have a very active imagination, and I was not discerning as to what I fed it with in my youth. 

So, I will be going along, minding my own business at home alone when suddenly a noise or random thought will trigger a memory of a scenario I have seen or heard of or read about and my mind is instantly planning my response to the  situation, even though it isn’t actually what is happening. Then my heart starts racing right along with my mind and then I suddenly notice every noise the house makes, each one triggering its own avalanche of what-ifs. 

Now, it might be argued that fear is a natural emotion, and that there’s nothing we can do about it. The vast number of commands in the Bible to “fear not” make it clear that God (who designed us) expects us to choose not to fear. For years, I have struggled to understand just how to do that.

Then at Family Camp this year our preacher made a statement that hit me so hard I was left nearly breathless at the simplicity and power of it. He said that the answer to fear is God.

Think about it. When we give in to fear, we are in fact choosing not to trust that God is able and willing to protect us. 

Up to this point, the main thing I have turned to as a way to stave off fear has been the television. I grew up with the television always on, and it is very difficult not to turn on the TV to “drown out” the noises that trigger the what-ifs. Interestingly enough, it doesn’t actually work. In fact, it makes it worse, because I will still think I hear something, but not be sure if I did or not because of the tv, and that triggers a whole new set of what-ifs.

I now realize that I was trusting the TV or other people to provide my sense of security, instead of simply trusting that in my need for security, as well as all else, God is enough.    

Can I say that again?

God is enough.

To be fearful in the face of the reality of His presence with me is to be like a small child, closing his eyes and believing that he cannot be seen. 

This weekend, my new determination to conquer fear was tested. It wasn’t a situation in which I was actually in danger, but I could have been, and the what-ifs began to pop into my mind. With the first what-if, I made a conscious choice not to follow that train of thought, and instead to direct my thoughts to God and the truth of His presence with me. At every step, there was a new tempting thought, and I had to decide again to fight it with truth. It was a hard battle, but it worked, and I got into my car feeling the freedom of having won a victory. 

Now, I have by no means arrived, and I will still have to battle, but I feel now that I know how to fight, and that victory is attainable with God’s help. 

I John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”

God doesn’t want us to live in fear. He wants us to let His love for us cast out our fears.