When God is Quiet.

As I have mentioned before I don’t like to wait.  I don’t know if it is a spiritual flaw or something else, but I avoid waiting.  However, the reality of life is that we will always have something to wait for.  Right now I am waiting for a mechanic.  The vehicle I was riding in decided it did not want to go to the village today.  So we sit and wait. 

In this moment I have had some time to stop and think through the question, Paul Grenier, that you asked on Facebook. 

“Where have you felt the presence of God in your new home?”  

This is not an easy question for me to answer. The truth of the matter is that I am waiting on God.  Over the past year (other than in small ways) the voice of God has been still and Quiet, and I am waiting.

This is not to say that His presence has been absent, or that I misheard the voice of God to come here.  I believe we followed well as God changed our destination halfway through language school.  And, even now, I believe Senegal is we are where we are supposed to be. 

Yet and still, the voice of God has fallen quiet.  I feel like an Israelite who stood at the base of Sini while something amazing happened somewhere else and I just sat and watched. 

So I must answer your question with a question:
What do you do when God is quiet?

I am not certain that I have an answer that immediately satisfies the longing that I feel, the longing for the familiar voice of God.  However, I do know that my experience is not exclusive to me.  If you read the scriptures, you will see its pages full of people crying out to a God who is quiet. 

The danger (dare I say temptation) in these moments is that we stop waiting.  My confession to you is I now understand the Israelites’ temptation to make a Golden Cow.  The cow may not have a real voice but I can at least make it say what I want. 

So how do we wait well?  I don’t believe there is a simple, cut and dry, answer.  I fear if I give a list of “do these five” we will place too much faith on the list.  We say things like, “I did those five things but it still hurts.”  If we focus too much on the discipline of waiting we stop looking at the God for whom we wait. 

With that said, I now share with you the five things I do in these moments of waiting.  These are not magic or easy.  I won’t say this is a biblical formula that can be found in 3 Samuel 4:20 somewhere.  However, these steps did come from many biblical examples that informed my experiences of waiting on God during hard times.  If you have a desire for more of God, while you wait, then the roots of your faith will dig in deep and find nourishment during even the most formidable droughts. 

1. Long to hear God’s voice

Begin with longing.  Long for God’s voice.  This is the foundation of Psalm 42.  In the late 1990’s there was a popular worship chorus that used this psalm as its hook.  The problem was this worship song was happy and upbeat.  Psalm 42 is a bitter psalm of lament.  The psalmist is singing in the midst of an arid, spiritual dry, and traumatic place.  The refrain in psalm 42 is,

Why are you cast down, O my soul,

and why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

my salvation and my God.

           

The psalmist acknowledges 2 things.  1) His soul is downcast and 2) he longs for God.  He is longing to see the movements of God in his life. He has hope that God will once again be seen. 

This may be where I struggle the most, right at the beginning.  I don’t want to long for God when it hurts.  I want to blame God.  “I hurt because of you God.”  This is not reality. In reality we have a God who does not avoid our pain.  We have a personal God who entered into our pain, and suffered with us and ultimately for us.  So in the midst of even our most painful waiting we can, as the psalmist does, wait and hope in God

2. Remind yourself of God’s historical faithfulness

The bible, especially the Old Testament, is filled with historical retellings of the miraculous history of Israel.  Every time God is at the center, demonstrating his love and faithfulness to the people of Israel. 

If you read Nehemiah 9 you will see a prayer from the people of God that is at the end of their season of waiting, and in it you will see a great reminder of God’s faithfulness to his people, despite their unfaithfulness.  Read Nehemiah 9:18-19:

“Even when they had made for themselves a golden calf and said, ‘This is your God who brought you up out of Egypt,’ and had committed great blasphemies, you in your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness. The pillar of cloud to lead them in the way did not depart from them by day, nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way by which they should go.”

We do well to remind ourselves of God’s historical faithfulness to us. (This is why journaling is a good discipline.) For me I often turn to the early days of seminary.  I just spent a long year in the deserts in the Middle East in one of the most spiritually dry moments of my life.  When seminary   It was sweet and good and God’s immediate presence was wonderfully felt.  His abundance was rightly appreciated because of his faithful shepherding through the desert. 

began the word of God opened to me like a life giving well in the middle of a sun parched land.

Not that I am in a desert now, but I am still in a season of waiting.  (One that I pray ends soon.)  Even though now is a much different season from then, I am comforted by God’s faithfulness to me in in that desert, where I was not nearly as faithful to him as he was to me. 

3. Pray for sensitivity

This is something I have started doing recently and the results were frankly surprising.  Though God has shepherded us faithfully during this time, my heart has been less than sensitive to the movements of the Spirit of God.  My heart has been anesthetized. 

Sometimes when we experience wounds there is a process of healing that must take place.  During the healing often good doctors will numb us so that they can operate.  I wonder if some of my numbness was due to God repairing wounds that sunk deep in my soul.  Regardless, now is the time to pray for sensitivity to the movement of the Spirit. 

Now this goes to directly answering your question, Paul.  The answer to the prayer for spiritual sensitivity yielded an unexpected result.  I experienced the absence of God.  There are many spiritual forces battling here.  God exposed me first not to His presence but to the reality of the battle. 

For example, there are children here who are trained to beg.  There are men who claim to be teachers but exploit these young ones.  It was the first time they came up to me and asked for money I felt the depth of the battle.  My soul was immediately burdened.  It was as if I could feel the mill-stone of injustice dragging these young ones down into a spiritual grave.

You could see, in their eyes, a hopelessness, and I felt their despair and my helplessness to do anything.  And yet in that moment God answered my prayer.  He showed me his heart and brokenness for the hurt and the broken.  Sometimes, I am discovering, to experience God’s presence He lovingly burdens us with what brings Him sorrow. 

I was sensitized to the need.  And I must continue to pray that God would faithfully make my heart spiritually sensitive.  Even if it is hard. 

4. Wait with anticipation

This for me is the hardest part.  Waiting to see what God will do.  God moves in power but we must wait on his movement.  In my life the greatest moments of destruction were when I refused to wait on God.  I said, “God, I know you have good things for me but I want them now not later.”  Often the blessings he has for you later are a curses now. 

Take for example Saul who did not wait on God well he made a sacrifice in his own power, for his own power, and failed to wait for God’s movement.  The kingship was stripped from his family and it was the destruction of his family. (1 Samuel 13:8-14)

But what joy when we wait well.  Think of the Exodus from Egypt such a powerful movement of the power of God after 400 years of waiting, Exodus 2:23-25.  Joshua 5:13-15, Joshua meets the Commander of the Lord’s Armies just before the defeat of Jericho, after a 40 year wait in the desert.  After 70 years of exile Ezra and Nehemiah return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple and the walls, and to restore a people to proper worship.  After many thousands of years of waiting a young woman was told she was going to have a child (Luke 1:26-33) and the angles celebrated when the Word became Flesh (John 1:14) and God revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ.  Certainly we have waited 2000 years with great anticipation for the day that Jesus returns and calls His beloved church to himself and rightly brings justice to the world (Revelation 19). 

The Bible is overflowing with examples of waiting well.  We look forward, after looking backwards, knowing that God, being consistent, has done, and will do, amazing things, if we will faithfully wait on him.

5. Repeat

This is not a onetime process.  We must do this over and over and over and over again.  Sometimes this is just for one season of waiting.  Sometimes this is just during one day. Sometimes this is during one hour.  I wake up every day trying to renew myself in this God focused waiting. 

With that said.  Today (it has taken me about 2 weeks to write this post (p.s. the car is running again.)) I had a conversation, with a local pastor here, about the future of our ministry in Senegal.  As the conversation unfolded I discovered that the passions and experiences God gave me on this wide winding road are preparatory for the ministry I am about to begin.  (Which will be the subject for future updates.)

We see God beginning to move in unexpected ways after a long and sometimes difficult season of waiting.  I cannot wait to see what he will do next. 

Prayer Points

This leads me to our prayer points.  First how can we pray for you.  I find my ministry is only as good as long as I have people to pray for.  So let me know your prayer points either here in the comments or on Facebook.  

- Pray for us to have a new desire and delight in God.  Specifically, that He will restore to us the joy of His salvation (Psalm 51:12). 

- Pray that our team will have wisdom as we will go through many transitions this year. 

- Pray for our local partners, specifically the pastor to whom I spoke this afternoon, to have strategic, God focused vision for the people of Senegal. 

- Pray that the Girls (Hannah, Amelia, and Felicity) love for Jesus would grow.

- Pray for Hannah because she seems to have some recurring allergies that giving her asthma. 

I pray for you that you would learn the joy of waiting well.  I pray that your joy may be made complete in Jesus our God and Savior.  I pray that you would have new life in him. 

Thank you for your wonderful questions. Please continue to keep asking me questions and I will continue to do my best to answer them.  Here is a question for you would any of you be interested in me doing a post on our call to missions?   Leave your thoughts in the comments below.