When God Seems Silent — Broken & Hopeful

Do you ever feel that you are the only one who endures days, weeks or months of what feels like silence from God? The valley of the shadow of death stretches long in front of you, and it looks like a tumultuous relationship, or anxiety, or unemployment or just the mundaneness of it all making you feel insignificant and unimportant. And it seems God has taken a lunch break and is unavailable, or worse has decided to punish you for something while He remains aloof?

Mike Wells used to tell a story about the dark room of a photographer where the negatives were taken, left without a feeling of God’s presence (although He never left), immersed in an acid bath and came out as a beautiful picture. The negatives became positives, but the dark room was the catalyst for this. Have you felt like you were in the dark room?

I balk at the dark room. I don’t like it, and I don’t want to go there. But it is in the dark room where I am freed from what I want to count as all the negatives in my life. In the suffering of feeling like God is against me, I discover He is for me and loves me infinitely. I see in the end that the dark room must be the only place to find this out because He wouldn’t allow me to go through it without purpose.

So, what do we do when it feels like God is silent and we realize we are in the dark room?

1. Go back to the truth. You know who God says He is—stand on that. He is not a liar (Num 23:19), He is a caring Shepherd (Psalm 23) and nothing can separate us from His love (Rom 8:38-39). Even when your feelings tell you this can’t be right, you stand on the truth.
2. Remember the past dark rooms and the positives that were revealed in them. I can look back at some very hard times in my life which felt never-ending and torturous. But in the end, God was faithful. He brought positives out of those as only He can. Remind yourself of His work in your life, and the freedom you have seen come out of it.
3. Let the moments get very small. You don’t have to figure out the future, just live in today. When you start thinking that this circumstance is going to last forever, that you are never going to get out of this and other future extremes, you are going to be pretty hopeless. This moment, right now, I will choose to stay in that small moment.
4. Cry out to Jesus. Keep coming back to Him in pain, in joy and in all the rest of life. The only way you are going to get through today is the power of His Life in you, so keep coming back to that focus. Admit you are weak—He knows already and is ready to be all that you need for this hard day.
5. Recognize He is taking you deeper in relationship with Him. This suffering is not because God is sadistic or mean. He sees the positive He wants to bring out of the negative, and He knows how it can draw you deeper into this fascinating relationship with Him.

If God seems silent today and you feel you have been left in the dark room of negatives, will you count on the faithfulness of God as He pursues you in love and reveals the positives in all the negatives? Any time you get discouraged or frustrated with the circumstance, let Him remind you of who He is and how He is going to get you through.

So now I live with the confidence that there is nothing in the universe with the power to separate us from God’s love. I’m convinced that his love will triumph over death, life’s troubles, fallen angels, or dark rulers in the heavens. There is nothing in our present or future circumstances that can weaken his love.  There is no power above us or beneath us—no power that could ever be found in the universe that can distance us from God’s passionate love, which is lavished upon us through our Lord Jesus, the Anointed One! Romans 8:38-39