two steps forward. one step back.

If you read my last post, “growing pains” you know I’ve been having trouble seeing God’s hand in my life over the last few months.

God has been silent.

When I first became aware of the silence, I immediately assumed sin was separating me from God. I confessed all the sin I could identify. I raked through my life and identified the sin I had been rationalizing or been numb and oblivious to. I asked God to reveal to me anything I hadn’t found.

Be careful what you pray for.

I let go of some things in my life. Good things. One thing in particular that was responsible for actually helping me to discover how to worship God – to praise Him – for who He was instead just thank Him for what He did for me; for the blessings He afforded. This was something I had never understood or been able to do before. That’s what made leading worship a good thing. a very good thing.

I let it go because it had morphed into a crutch I had become dependent on to facilitate that worship.

I let go of other “good” things too. They had become obstacles in my relationship with Him.

But if you are one of the handful of people who actually read this blog regularly, you know all that.

Since then, God has been silent.

I’ve been seeking God every day. Relentlessly.

that’s an understatement.

Still. God has been silent.

crickets.

After more than 6 years of sensing God’s presence and movement in my daily life, it took less than two months for me to become resigned to the silence.

Not seeing or sensing God’s hand in my life, I stopped looking for it.

I expected the silence. It became my new normal.

I began reading everything I could about finding delight and joy in God. About spiritual dryness, spiritual darkness, the absence of God and the silence of God. C.S. Lewis, R.C. Sproul, John Piper, Philip Yancey and authors new to me, like Thomas Green, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila. People who experienced and wrote about the “dark night.” Some of them talked about the dark night lasting the rest of their life.

I stopped writing in my prayer journal.

I had nothing to say.

I began abiding.

I threw myself into the mindless work of purging my environment and my life of superfluous things.

I began learning how to “pray without words” as C.S. Lewis would say. I stopped filling up the space between me and God with my voice. my incessant talking. I shut up. and I listened.

And God was silent.

In the beginning, I hated it. It was unsettling.

I was brokenhearted. I don’t say that kind stuff about myself. But there’s really no better way to describe it.

C.S. Lewis described it this way:

“We can bear to be refused but not to be ignored. In other words, our faith can survive many refusals if they really are refusals and not mere disregards. The apparent stone will be bread to us if we believe that a Father’s hand put it into ours, in mercy or in justice or even in rebuke.”
from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

After a few weeks, there was peace in the quiet. Like sitting with a close friend. The kind of friend you can ride in a car with, not talking, and feel no need to fill the void with spoken words. completely grounded. no need for a stealth “#awkward” tweet from the passenger seat.

so, there was peace.

but not joy.

In my last post, I said that I hadn’t been able to pray any specific petitionary prayers because I didn’t trust my motives. I said that last Monday I had hit bottom. The silence had become unbearable.

I broke.

I asked God to let me sing again. In my weakness, I instinctively reached out for the one thing that had allowed me to experience true JOY in God – regardless of my circumstances.

Singing to Him. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it since June 30th.

I went to bed that Monday night, the silence ringing in my mind. Disappointed in myself for caving. For chickening out and turning my back on whatever God is trying to teach me in this time of silence. Instead of trusting in the process of this journey, I reached out for old, tried and true, comfortable habits.

I wimped out.

I was convinced God was teaching me something. Something important. Although I had no idea what and I had no idea how long the lesson would last. It seemed that, at what appeared to be the hardest part of the lesson, I was asking God to give back what I had given up. I was going backward. I was turning my back on what He has for me now.

As I fell asleep, I took back my request. I told God that I didn’t want to settle for temporal blessings of comfort and happiness in exchange for this new relationship. Even if the new relationship meant years of silence.

Last Monday night was my darkest night.

[CLICK HERE to see a listing of all the blog posts in this series “the search for Joy.”]