What The Quiet Is Not Saying

He is not angry with God. He wants that understood before anything else, because people assume anger and this is worse than anger.

What he has done is read something. Nobody taught it to him and he did not decide it. He went without for that thing, for his family, more than once, and it did not move, and in the quiet afterwards he read a meaning, and the meaning was this: God has turned His face away from us.

Not from everybody. From us. From this house on this road with these particular people in it.

And once a man has read a thing like that, he cannot unread it. It sits underneath the ordinary business of a week. It is there when he is at work and it is there when he is joking with his children, and he is functioning perfectly well, and it is there.

He has said none of this out loud. His people do not use those words easily, and there is a version of him that everybody relies on, and that version does not say that God has turned away from the family.

And a friend from church said, kindly, at a gathering: brother, has anybody fasted for that again?

He said maybe. And what moved in him was not hope. It was the reading, confirming itself. Here is another chance for the quiet to say the same thing.

If you have read the silence and cannot unread it, come and sit up here on the porch. I am going to name the wound before I say anything else, because that is the only honest order.

Say what it actually is

Before anything gets said about God, something gets said about the size of this.

A man who has concluded that God has turned away from his house is carrying something heavier than grief and quieter than despair, and he is usually carrying it while doing everything else perfectly well, which is why nobody notices. There is no ceremony for it. There is no casserole. There is a man at a table joking with his children with something enormous sitting behind his sternum.

And it is not blasphemy and it is not a failure of faith. It is what a person concludes when they asked for something with everything they had and nothing came back.

You are not being judged for the conclusion, and it has not put you outside anything. That is not a soft word on a porch. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been sitting behind that sternum with you for the whole of it, and has never once agreed with what the quiet seemed to say.

And nothing here will tell you why. Nobody knows why. Anybody who says they do is guessing.

Scripture says something about hiddenness itself

There is a line that people rarely quote, and it is worth seeing that the Bible says it about God without flinching.

Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.Isaiah 45:15

Read the whole sentence, because both halves are load bearing.

It says He hides. That is in there, stated plainly, not explained away and not softened. And in the very same breath and about the very same God, it says Savior.

Those are not two moods. That is one Person, described accurately by somebody who had watched Him do both, and the sentence refuses to let you take the hiddenness as the final information about who He is.

You are dealing with a God whose hiddenness is described in the same line as His saving, and neither half cancels the other. I am not saying that to soften a hard year: it is the actual sentence in Isaiah, in that order (Isaiah 45:15), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes it something a man can put weight on when the quiet has been going on a long time.

The quiet is real. What the quiet is not is a verdict, and it is not a message that reads: not this house.

And what you went without bought nothing

Here is a thing said flatly, because it has been feeding the reading.

It did not fail. It was never a mechanism, so failure was not available to it. It did not fall short of a length and it was not spoiled by anything in you and it did not almost work.

You did not do it wrongly, and the outcome is not a report on your family. Scripture is blunt that God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent (Numbers 23:19), which means He is not a system that responds when it is worked properly, and it is His Spirit who makes that a weight lifting rather than an argument you would rather not have.

Nobody here is going to promise it will work next time. You would hear that for what it was.

Now something said plainly, and on this page it always is. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from them. If anybody in that house lives with diabetes, is pregnant or nursing, takes medication, has ever had a hard relationship with eating, is underweight, unwell, elderly or simply unsure, they should speak to their doctor before going without anything, and let that answer be the answer. And a man carrying what you are carrying needs feeding, not one more thing removed. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to a household on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.