The Silence

The silence of God is something that really messes with my mind. I think I understand why it's necessary, or at least part of why. And I know sometimes an explanation wouldn't help. When Peter Lake decides that a good thing to do would be to crawl into the trash bag with his dirty litter and pee on it, all he gets is that I'm unhappy with him. Using words to explain why is an exercise in futility, because he doesn't have the ability to comprehend my language. I know that's what it's like with God sometimes. That analogy doesn't 100% work for me though, because I'm not omnipotent, and God is. If there was a way for me to create a world where Peter Lake could pee anywhere he pleased all the time, I would. It does me no good to prevent him from doing things he likes, except that it's gross and I don't like it. That's not true with God. He is able to create a world where I understand why things are happening and where my life makes sense and when I ask questions I hear answers.

I think about God's silence a lot this time of year. Christmas is a holiday of the loudest, most joyful noise of all time breaking into the most indignant silence of all time. For 400 years between the prophet Malachi and the arrival of the angel Gabriel, God was silent. His silence then must have been much more dreadful, because there was no Holy Spirit. It was just God the Father until Jesus came along, and He made Himself known in very obvious ways (i.e. flaming pillars, earthquakes, booming voices). When He fell silent, it must have seemed as if the world was ending.

My two favorite Christmas songs are, for this reason, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" and "O Holy Night." Both of these songs manage to capture the desperation and doubt the Israelites were feeling when all of a sudden a great light burst forth and everything changed. God was real. He had come through and now it all made sense. For a brief time, that is, until it turned out that Jesus wasn't at all what anyone had hoped He'd be, and then He has to go die on a cross.

Things seem to move in cycles like that. There is so much clarity, and the doors are not only open but there's a red carpet leading up to them, and welcoming faces on the other side. Ducks are in a row, the stars align ... everything CLICKS. There's no confusion, and you sort of walk around like you own the place and you know exactly what's going on. And then, somehow, the darkness falls again and you start to wonder if you imagined all the red carpet in the first place. I know all the "Christian" explanations for God's silence: He's teaching you something, you wouldn't understand the plan if He told you, He's got something better just around the corner ... personally I think God Himself grows tired of these sorts of things. The only explanation He offered Job was: Me God. You not. Sit down. I've learned to believe in a God that is bigger than His own absence, and to seek hope in the fact that after 400 years of silence, the world's greatest miracle arrived, and after 72 hours of silence, death was overcome. I'm not asking for a reason or a glimpse of the future or even an eventual miracle. It's just

sometimes the silence of God is heavy.

Song In My Head: "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" - officially Phillips, Craig, and Dean, but really this awesome arrangement a girl at church sang last night: "O come, o come Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel/That mourns in lonely exile here until the son of God appear/Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee O Israel ..."