The Audacity of a Silent God

I have discovered that I am incredibly faithful when God is behaving the way I think God should behave.

There.

That’s ugly enough to start with.

Because I would love to tell myself that my faith is unbreakable. That after everything I have survived, everything I have watched God bring me through, everything I know about His character, I am one of those “though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” people.

Except sometimes I am more of a “though He mildly inconveniences me, I would like to speak with management” person.

Especially when He gets quiet.

God’s silence has offended me before.

Not because I stopped believing He existed. Somehow, that would almost be easier to admit. No, I knew He was there.

That was the problem.

I knew He was there, and I couldn’t understand why He wasn’t saying anything.

I prayed.

Silence.

I cried.

Silence.

I tried to do the right thing.

Silence.

I loved people when I could have been ugly. I forgave when I had every reason to stay mad. I obeyed instructions that cost me something. I showed up. I served. I gave. I tried to keep my heart clean.

Then life started life-ing, and suddenly I was standing before God with an invisible receipt in my hand.

Excuse me, Lord.

I believe there has been a mistake.

I have been GOOD.

Which sounds ridiculous when I write it down, but apparently somewhere along the way I had quietly turned obedience into currency.

I thought obedience bought access to outcomes.

I thought kindness earned protection.

I thought faithfulness meant God owed me an explanation when life hurt.

This morning God humbled me quickly.

Because Matthew 15:21–28 introduced me to a woman who had every reason to be offended by Jesus, and somehow she worshipped instead.

Her daughter was suffering.

That matters to me.

Because when I read “daughter” this morning, I didn’t only see a child.

I saw life.

The life I birthed.

The things I prayed over, built, nurtured, envisioned, protected, sacrificed for, and called mine.

My marriage.

My purpose.

My ministry.

My relationships.

My dreams.

My plans.

The version of my life I carried internally before anybody else could see it externally.

There are things I have birthed that I have eventually had to carry back to Jesus because something started tormenting the very thing I worked so hard to bring into the world.

That woman wasn’t asking Jesus for something frivolous.

Her life was hurting.

And Jesus was silent.

That part bothers me.

Actually, let me stop trying to sound spiritually mature.

That part would have made me mad.

Matthew says she cried out to Him, and “Jesus did not answer a word.”

Sir?

Because apparently my first spiritual gift is follow-up questions.

She came to the One she believed could help her, told Him exactly what was wrong, and He said nothing.

I have lived there.

I have prayed prayers that seemed to hit the ceiling and fall right back into my lap.

I have asked God questions and received enough silence to start answering them myself.

That is usually where I get into trouble.

Because silence makes me uncomfortable, and when God doesn’t explain Himself quickly enough, I have occasionally volunteered to become His public relations department.

“Well, maybe God means…”

Girl, hush.

Sometimes I don’t know what God means.

Sometimes He hasn’t told me.

Sometimes faith is having no statement from Heaven and refusing to manufacture one.

The woman kept crying out.

Then the disciples got irritated.

“Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”

That sentence sat differently with me this morning.

Because they weren’t living her emergency.

Her daughter wasn’t their daughter.

Her pain wasn’t interrupting their sleep.

Her crisis wasn’t sitting on their chest.

It is amazing how quickly suffering becomes annoying when it belongs to somebody else.

They were walking with Jesus and still managed to lack compassion for someone desperately trying to get to Him.

That convicted me.

Because proximity to Jesus does not automatically make me empathetic.

I can know Scripture and still be insensitive.

I can worship and still be impatient with somebody’s pain.

I can follow Jesus closely enough to hear His teaching and somehow still decide another person’s desperation is inconvenient.

The disciples heard annoying persistence.

That mother heard her daughter suffering.

Same crying.

Completely different perspective.

And I had to ask myself how many times I have judged somebody’s reaction because I wasn’t carrying what produced it.

Maybe they weren’t being dramatic.

Maybe they were desperate.

Maybe what sounded excessive to me felt like survival to them.

Jesus was silent.

His team was mean.

And she stayed.

Whew.

Because I have walked away for less.

I have gotten offended with God because He didn’t respond on my preferred timeline. I have emotionally packed my little spiritual suitcase because prayer wasn’t producing the outcome I expected.

Meanwhile, this woman survived silence and then survived offense.

She survived the disciples wanting her gone.

She survived an answer from Jesus that still didn’t sound like the answer she came for.

Yet when she finally got before Him, Matthew 15:25 says she knelt before Him.

She worshipped.

After the silence.

That is the part that exposed me.

Can I worship God after He doesn’t answer me?

Not after He fixes it.

Not after the testimony.

Not after the breakthrough post with the cute caption about how “God did it.”

Can I worship Him while the daughter is still suffering?

Can I worship while the life I birthed looks nothing like the life I imagined?

Can I worship while Heaven is quiet?

Because apparently I have sometimes treated worship like a thank-you note for favorable circumstances.

She treated worship like recognition of who He was.

Then came the crumbs.

Jesus spoke about the children’s bread and the dogs, and she answered that even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.

I would love to tell you my response would have been equally humble.

Mine might have been,

“Actually, Jesus, considering everything I have done…”

And there it is again.

Entitlement.

She never presented her résumé.

She didn’t say, “Do You know how good I’ve been?”

She didn’t remind Him how many people she helped.

She didn’t argue that she deserved a miracle.

She essentially said, I know I don’t own the table. I just know there is enough power in what falls from it.

That wrecked me.

Because on my best day, I did not earn grace.

On my worst day, I cannot exhaust it.

My faith does not exist to alter God’s will until it resembles mine.

My faith exists to keep me anchored to Him when His will does not resemble what I wanted.

And maybe that is what unbreakable faith actually is.

Not faith that never bends.

Faith with roots deep enough to survive the bending.

Being a Southern California girl, palm trees make sense to me.

I grew up seeing them everywhere. Tall, skinny, almost ridiculous-looking trees standing against wind that should seemingly have enough leverage to snap them.

Yet palms were made with wind in mind.

They bend.

They sway.

They look downright disrespectful in a storm.

Yet underneath the ground is the part nobody applauds.

The roots.

A palm tree’s strength is not that its trunk refuses to move.

Its strength is that movement above ground does not necessarily mean destruction below it.

And I think I have spent too much time asking God to stop the wind when perhaps some seasons are revealing whether I developed roots.

Because pressure is going to make me bend.

Grief has bent me.

Disappointment has bent me.

Silence has bent me.

Betrayal has bent me.

Waiting has bent me.

There have been seasons when I looked at my own life and thought, Oh, baby, we are absolutely going down.

Yet bending and breaking are not the same thing.

I don’t keep myself together.

I keep the thing that keeps me together, together.

My connection to God.

My prayer life.

My worship.

My obedience.

My roots.

Because if the enemy cannot immediately destroy what is visible, he will gladly attack what keeps it standing.

Which made me think about 50 First Dates.

Lucy wakes up every morning without yesterday.

Every day Henry has to show up again.

Yesterday’s conversation cannot sustain today’s relationship.

Yesterday’s breakthrough does not mean she wakes up remembering him.

Yesterday’s effort does not exempt him from today’s pursuit.

He has to choose her again.

And again.

And again.

Annoyingly.

Persistently.

Repeatedly.

There is something about that kind of persistence that challenged me this morning because I realized how often I want yesterday’s faith to cover today’s wind.

I prayed yesterday.

I worshipped yesterday.

I trusted God last season.

I obeyed when He told me to do that other thing.

Wonderful.

Good morning.

Choose Him again.

Today has its own wind.

Today needs roots.

Today needs worship.

Today needs faith.

I cannot live indefinitely on the memory of yesterday’s encounter.

Some mornings faith feels a little like waking up in 50 First Dates.

“Hi, Lord. Apparently we’re doing this again.”

And maybe that is exactly the point.

Because unbreakable faith is not one enormous decision I make once.

It is a thousand little decisions to stay.

Stay when He speaks.

Stay when He doesn’t.

Stay when people around me lack empathy.

Stay when I feel misunderstood.

Stay when what I birthed is suffering.

Stay when I don’t like the answer.

Stay when I have to ask again.

Stay when my feelings tell me that silence means abandonment.

Stay long enough to learn that God’s silence is not proof of God’s absence.

Daniel 3 gives me another picture of this.

“Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us…”

They knew He could.

“And He will deliver us…”

They believed He would.

“But even if He does not…”

There are the roots.

Not “if He does not exist.”

Not “if He does not love us.”

Not “if He does not deserve our worship.”

If He does not do what we know He has the power to do.

That is a terrifying level of faith.

I am still learning it.

Because I have had faith that depended heavily on God behaving predictably.

I want something sturdier now.

I want faith that can survive silence.

Faith that can survive offense.

Faith that doesn’t need everybody around me to understand why I’m still crying after Jesus.

Faith that can hear “no” and somehow still kneel.

Faith that doesn’t hand God a receipt for my obedience and demand reimbursement in blessings.

Faith that remembers I am not entitled to the table, yet remains absolutely convinced of the goodness of the One sitting at it.

I want palm-tree faith.

Bendable.

Not breakable.

Because maybe the goal was never to become so strong that nothing could move me.

Maybe the goal was to become so rooted that movement could no longer destroy me.

And when the wind blows hard enough to bend me until I barely recognize myself, I want my roots to answer the question my circumstances keep asking:

Are you still staying?

Yes.

Today, again.

Even if I have to wake up tomorrow and choose it all over again.

Because apparently faith has its own version of 50 First Dates.

And God humbled me enough this morning to realize:

I don’t need yesterday’s certainty.

I need today’s yes.