Waiting in Silence!

As I wrote the title to this rant just now, a deep sense of apprehension cascaded across my body. The hair on my arms rose up, and a chill ran down me despite the under armor long johns I am wearing for the winter. To the best of my recollection it is coming up on seven years. Seven silent and in many ways terrifying years…

Psalm 46:10 “Be still and know that I am God”…

That is the last thing He said to me before everything went silent. I never sense His absence, just His silence. And it isn’t just the last seven years. It either came to a head or began Christmas day 2002. The passage of time beyond that day is a blur for the next six years. Those are the days He carried me!

It has been an agonizing thirteen years. An unimaginably painful journey through a deep, dark valley made of family tragedy and pain that has come in successive waves. Sometimes so close together you haven’t been given a chance to exhale from the previous one. It is all a matter of public record for the most part. But none the less when the story is told in its entirety, sometimes only half way through it… you see it happen. You watch the question appear in their eyes. You sense the icy finger of doubt slice through your conversation. “Come on” they think! Individually these things happen to one out of ten… maybe a hundred families, never successively over a period of years to just one family...

I am wasting words, that is enough said! This is not about my journey or my story. This is about waiting, ‘Waiting on God’. I really can’t even begin to describe what it is like to be oppressed from any and every imaginable direction and wake up every morning with hope for a better tomorrow. Then, days, weeks, months… thirteen years pass and still, no Word, no horizon, no tomorrow beyond the moments in front of you… just silence. Yet, silence in the face of miraculous deliverance. I said earlier; “I never sense His absence”, and I don’t. But the pain of His silence has become unbearable. That is the only word that comes to mind and yet it doesn’t describe the pain of this silence.

I still completely place my faith in Him. There is nothing, no other choice outside of Him. The choice is either Him or not. That is the clarity that has come from this. Not just clarity, but a yearning for him that rivals that which I have for my wife. I know we all profess as Christians to have a love for God above all else. I do and I am sure you do as well. But this surpasses that. It is a physical yearning that goes beyond a carnal or sensual feeling (although it is a part of it). It has crystallized this verse in my mind:

Luke 14: 26,27 – If any one comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes even their own life- such a person can not be my disciple.  And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

If you ever read Job chapter three you will get an idea of what living in a prolonged state of agony does to your soul. It is often thought ‘not’ to be a good chapter to read when in a state of severe depression. I totally disagree! I can not tell you how closely I identify with the thoughts expressed in this chapter. I find absolute solace and something I can repeat to God in Jobs words. Living like this brings passages like Luke 14:26,27 to life… it is crystallized by living with a deep love for a God who is able to deliver you without so much as a thought… and doesn’t or won’t. Even as He sits right beside you and watches you suffer! And you accept that because you believe He knows and Loves you, despite His silence and all the evidence to the contrary. What develops from this is what I described earlier as an irrepressible longing to physically be with God. Sometimes so much that you ‘like a baby’ want to crawl into His lap and be held. I keep having this persistent thought of wanting to love God more than any other human that has lived… if only I could. The truth is I don’t even know how to love. But with what I have. With what for me is ‘love’ and everything else that is inside me, all of it wants to be God’s favorite possession. Too literally walk this world and into the next daily and physically hand in hand with God. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS to me. Nothing else in my life compares. And all that I love here is an object affected by the pain bleeding from my life. And because of it, because of my failure, my inability to change any of the pain that is wrought by my own hand in the life of those I love… I detest it! I detest all that I am, all that is tainted by this world. Many days I just want to go home, or stop existing. My only hope for anything is found in Him alone. There is nothing left outside of that. There is nothing else of value. Everything that I know… that I have touched is so broken that I feel every breath I spend outside of a complete pursuit of God is a breath wasted. Long ago, I used to wonder how people decided which decisions to bounce off of God and which ones they rolled through on their own. To me it appears that I have so royally screwed up everything by making my own decisions that I don’t want to make a single decision apart from Him anymore. I don’t want to exist without Him. And the closer He is the better.

I am an A type personality! If I do anything it is 150% or nothing at all. If Gods end game is a close personal relationship with me. Then no one is going to get closer! At least that is how I feel inside.1 Corinthians 10:13 tells us in essence that nothing is going to happen to us that hasn’t first been filtered through Gods eternal hands. And there are so many other passages that make the case that all of it is His. He controls it down to the minutest detail and nothing escapes His attention. So even though my family and I are still thirteen years later walking on a dark, barren and rocky road with absolutely no end in site, I still trust Him! I know He is here, right beside me. Really holding my hand… He even said so! I still love Him… even more. I can not begin to tell you how crystal clear the vision He has given me of what a life would be like in the absence of God. I guess that is where the longing for Him comes from. The word “Frightening” doesn’t cover what life would be like without God. And when you consider how frail, broken and even detestable my life is under His gaze. How ridicules even the thought that He knows of my existence is. Yet not only does He, He loves me… and not just loves me, but He likes me! And He wants to spend the day with me, caring for me, teaching me, loving me… maturing me! Maybe the last thirteen years and those that are to come are the only way I could have seen. Can clearly see Him… See His love for me. And in turn, from my dead and blackened heart, create a love for Him self.

I don’t have any answers because He hasn’t given me any. But I do see something now that I could not have seen otherwise. I see how insignificant all that my life has been in the light of eternity. A thousand years from now we will probably not even remember this time. And it certainly will have no impact on our life any more than high school does to a fifty year old. The only thing that will matter, the only thing that will last; is only that which God builds through me.