I have a secret to tell about many deep and spiritual people. It’s a dark secret many of us do not wish to talk about. Many of us wish it was not there. Many will pretend it is not there. But the fact of the matter is that it is universal and epidemic. It is real and affects most of us in profound ways.
We doubt God. We struggle. We hurt, we cry, we bleed. The Bible is full of real stories of real people who doubt too. And God left these verses, chapters, and stories of these people to remind us that He can handle our doubts–and yours too.
Never mistake the silence of God for the absence of God
It is echoed in the Psalms:
“But I, O Lord, cry out to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you. O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 88:13-14, NRSV).
“Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1, NRSV. And in Psalm 30, he laments God’s hiding after a time when the psalmist had confidence: “When I felt secure, I said, ‘I will never be shaken.’ O Lord, when you favored me, you made my mountain stand firm; but when you hid your face, I was dismayed” (Psalm 30:7, NIV).
Psalm 44 expresses it: “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?” (Psalm 44:23-24, NRSV).
I have had many intellectual struggles where God seemed absent.
At times, it feels like you are talking to the ceiling in your prayers. Cricks is all I hear.
We are not alone, even atheists and skeptics alike also struggle with this, claiming that “if God just reveled himself to me, I would believe in him.” Really?
J.L. Schellenberg in his book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, argues as follows:
1) If there is a God, he is perfectly loving.
2) If a perfectly loving God exists, reasonable nonbelief does not occur.
3) Reasonable nonbelief occurs.
4) No perfectly loving God exists (from 2 and 3).
5) Hence, there is no God (from 1 and 4).
CS Lewis wrote after God took his new wife with cancer:
“When you are happy, so happy 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.” ― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
It can also be called the “Dark Night of the Soul.” A book by this title was written in the 16th-century by the Spanish poet and Roman Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross. It’s that period of time in a believer’s life when God seems distant and silence to us and his silence is very loud!
Mother Theresa’s book, which was published after her death in 1997, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta talks about the problem too. She wrote Calcutta Archbishop Ferdinand Périer the following, her words are heart-breaking!
“There is such terrible darkness within me as if everything was dead…In my heart, there is no faith—no love—no trust—there is so much pain—the pain of longing, the pain of not being wanted. I want God with all the powers of my soul—and yet there between us—there is terrible separation. I don’t pray any longer.’ “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love—and now become as the most hated one…You have thrown away as unwanted—unloved…So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them—because of the blasphemy—If there be a God—please forgive me…I am told that God loves me,
