Have you ever felt as though God was silent? Has it ever seemed as though God was merely standing on the sidelines of your life, passively observing, yet doing nothing actively to protect you, shelter you, or guide you?
Have you ever felt as though God had not lived up to God’s promises and had instead written you a check that came back insufficient funds? When you feel as though God is silent, think on this:
1. That feeling that God is silent may result from the illusion that God is outside of us, when instead, God is within each of us!
Too often we externalize God. We think of God as somewhere up there and out there. Intellectually externalizing God causes us to set ourselves up to be on this never-ending search for God. We go to “places of worship” or “sanctuaries” designated to encourage spiritual growth and reflection, in hopes of meeting God and experiencing God. And what we meet, instead, are other humans who merely reflect to us our own feelings of inadequacy, incompleteness, and longing for significance.
When we perceive of God as outside of us, we constantly relinquish our power, because we look to others for direction and validation. While others may inspire, offer insights on spiritual truths, and provide a sense of community, the answers we seek outside of ourselves, are only to be found when we “get in touch” with the God within. When we wake up in the morning, God is there! When we close our eyes to sleep, God is there! In our moments of disappointment and mishaps, God is there! There is never any separation between us and God! The thought of our separation from God is merely an illusion.
2. Perhaps our worlds are so loud, filled with so many external distractions, that for us to hear God we must deliberately “tune out” in order to “tune in”.
One poet wrote, “Look back and thank God. Look forward and trust God. Look around and serve God. Look within and find God. Looking to find God outside of ourselves causes us to be vulnerable to other’s social and political agendas, theological biases, and personal preferences.
3. Perhaps the reason we think and feel God is silent is because God is speaking in ways that are unfamiliar to us.
God speaks to us in so many ways! God speaks through the Christian Bible, the Judaic Torah, the Islamic Quran, the Buddhist Sutras, and others. God speaks through our moments of meditation and quiet reflection. God speaks through the beauty of nature! God speaks through our observations of the ways in which our pets interact with us and the world about them. God speaks to us through what initially seemed as a “perchance encounter with a stranger” but was proved to be more a “divine encounter”, producing life enhancing results.
God is always speaking! Our task is to discover the medium through which God is speaking to us - where we are - here and now.
