Tuesday's Trust - The Silent Treatment ~by Tommy Prince, with C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Tuesday's Trust

The Silent Treatment

~by Tommy Prince

with C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be -- or so it feels -- welcomed with open arms.

But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find?

A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean?

Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

I tried to put some of these thoughts to C. this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: "Why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

I know. Does that make it easier to understand?

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.

The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.

The conclusion I dread is not "So there's no God after all," but "So this is what God is really like. Deceive yourself no longer."

~C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

*****

In last week's "Friday's Faith" post, I called the seeming silence and even the seeming disregard of God for my urgent prayers for my baby girl a "Sense of Betrayal."

And like Lewis, I didn't cease to believe in God. But what I believed about God resulted in a feeling of being traumatized by Him and being afraid to approach Him anymore, for anything.

Has anyone else felt this?

Picture of Vintage bolted door thanks to FotoSearch.com

Friday's Faith - God’s Passionate Hush

Friday's Faith

God’s Passionate Hush

Don’t think of His silence as disinterest

For even His silence communicates;

He speaks in the calm and in the tempest.

As one of us ponders or ruminates,

There is surely activity and care—

It just might not obviously be shown:

As thunder brews in the moist-laden air,

There is much going on—to us unknown;

As a mother watches her newborn child,

One may not see ev’ry thought, care or fear,

But should this mother o’er her child be riled,

You’ll see the ire of a mother bear rear.

There is such a thing as passionate hush—

God awaits; in time, to your side He’ll rush,

As He rushed to her side that night, I trust.

Picture: http://twitpic.com/105a35

Poem – God’s Passionate Hush – Angie Bennett Prince – 8/28/08

Tuesday’s Trust - Letter to My Readers

The (story) we sit down to write and the one we end up writing may be very different, just as the Jesus we grasp and the Jesus who grasps us may also differ. ~Madeleine L’Engle

Tuesday’s Trust

I apologize to you my readers. I fully intended to set out some scriptures to you to help you get a better glimpse of God's heart. So I did. I wrote out the scriptures; I even posted them in the early hours of today. But my post seemed lifeless. It appealed to the intellect, to give some sort of answers to many of our questions to God during grief. It talked about His amazing love for us, but I took the post down. Why did I take it down?

My Lord is living; He is alive, dynamic! The words that I wrote, although very true, were taken out of their proper context and thrown before you, to give you “answers” to some very tough questions we grievers often have of God. But THAT is not my experience of how God meets me in the middle of so many of my questions. And therefore, just spitting those “answers” out to you would not be true to my real message; spitting those “answers” out would not be fair to you my reader.

You deserve a better picture of God that is more true to how He presents Himself to me, fully engaging in my life, with His love overflowing, and a tenderness that surpasses all my expectations or what I could ever imagine from Him!

And so, the list of scriptures, although part of God’s Living Word, when set on my blog post, felt empty. They were separated from story, from the story of scripture, and from the story of my life when they ministered to me. So they rang hollow, emptied of the flesh they were poured into, the flesh of my life when I was in the throes of grief – in the throes of a mother’s worst desperation.

When I ask God my questions, He doesn’t give me “answers.”

He gives me Himself, not “answers”!

And He Himself is what satisfies, because when He comes to me, I know He loves me, and I know He loves my child. And how do I know that? Because He shows it; He doesn’t just “tell.” And that, after all, is the real answer to my need.

He owes none of us any explanations, but when we come in humble grieving before Him, He comes to us. He doesn’t have to, but He wants to. He hears our broken hearts, and it breaks His heart…because He loves us. And He attends to our wounds, our misconceptions, our hurt, our confusion, and our dismay.

Sure, I think over time, you may very well read each and every scripture I had posted earlier today. But hopefully, this time, you will hear them in their context: in story, in my story, in this grieving mother’s outcries to her Lord, and you will hear His loving responses—not always “answers,” but guides to get me back on track, of remembering who He really is, not who I, in the throes of grief, have made Him out to be.