If you read Sherry’s post earlier this week, I was the friend at the beach. It’s strange isn’t it, the void of silence echoing from the mountains to the beaches. Oddly poetic, no? 
You know that place of silence in a movie that is a split second of dramatic foreshadowing before something startles you?
Well, that is what last week was to this one.
You see, I walked my feet raw at the beach, looking, praying, hurting, begging to hear something, anything from God. I explored with the curiosity of the adrenaline driven, peered into the swirling waters, watched waves crash endlessly hour upon hour and watched the damp sand rapidly breathing after each wave, quickly drying.
Sometimes you search and you don’t find. Sometimes you only get silence.
When you get to a certain place in your spiritual life– when you’ve weathered small storms that seemed like hurricanes at the time but the hindsight shows they were merely pop-up showers with bright rainbows afterwords– you get to a point that you have to make a choice:
Do I really believe?
Because- what is the point otherwise? Either I’m an idiot to believe in the cosmic concept of a God or I need to act out in faith what I say I believe. I can’t have it either way anymore.
It’s the point where you have to act out blindly what you do not feel without a shred of doubt. I’m too far into this now. This is a new place to be, the security of faith in him who loves my soul even in the face of oppressive silence. Because I know that he is there, I know that he loves me like a child. and there is simply no room for doubt. If I can still doubt at this point, then what is the point of even having faith?
This seems so basic- to have faith. Yet, until real conflict, real pain under your own roof happens, it’s an untried faith. The childish faith has to grow out of the safety of a crib at some point.
I’ve doubted plenty over the years, I’ve even called myself a doubting Thomas and wrestled with the concepts of “all loving” and “predestination”. I’ve squabbled over petty things and argued philosophy and theology, berated some “controversial” Christian authors and pressed my point on pointless issues. I’ve played the devil’s advocate, mocked conservatives AND liberals, argued and self-righteously judged the judgers.
I’m silent now.
To be transparent, I’m not in a good place- some hard things happened when I returned and I’m not really sure where I am right now and I’m ok with that, there is freedom in loving myself enough to not have to have everything figured out. Maybe that’s why I’m sharing that here today, it’s ok to realize you don’t have all the answers, there are seasons of silence.
I had a wonderful time at the beach.
I love my work, I love my family, yet there are still dark storm clouds. Hello, life…
John 16:33 New Living Translation (NLT)
33 “I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.”
Maybe it’s the little storms that have built up my tolerance for this big one. Or maybe it’s a recycled storm of something I need to work though. And maybe later in my life I’ll look back at this current downpour and see it was simply a thunderstorm.
It feels like hurricane. I feel like I’ve hit a wall of wind that is pushing back, even as I strain forward but even in his continued silence, I trust him.
