Stewarding Silence

    When Jesus' birth is announced, an entire nation of Jews display a wide range of responses.  The long-awaited, promised Messiah finally arrives and while some rejoice, others display negative emotions that range from apathy to animosity.  I wonder if people's response to God's Son was reflective of their response to God's silence.  The thought is unsettling to me, because I have experienced long stretches of God's silence in my own life.  Have I been a wise steward of these spaces of silence?  Have I repeated God's promises and confidently rested  on the fact that He can be trusted?

Years ago my husband and I journeyed through five years of infertility.   When a much-longed-for adoption fell through, we dropped into an abyss of silence that threatened to swallow us (and our faith) whole.  After several weeks, I read a devotional by Oswald Chambers entitled "After God's Silence --What?"  He wrote, "Has God trusted you with a silence -- a silence that is big with meaning?  God's silences are His answers. . . . If God has given you a silence, praise Him, He is bringing you into the great run of His purposes."   I had never before thought of God's silence as active -- a means of bringing me into His purposes.  At best, God's silence seemed indifferent; at its worst, cruel and rejecting.  But though God is silent, He is never passive.

When God is silent, as He was for four hundred years for the Jews, He is always unfolding His redemptive plan.  Am I willing to wait with expectancy?  Am I willing to believe He is good even when circumstances suggest otherwise?   Or will I busy myself, looking for ways to avoid the pain of His silence?  Will I find ways to stay in control?  Will I push God to the sidelines of my life, trying to ignore Him, because He seems to be ignoring me?  It is in the darkness of God's silence that faith grows best.  Will I believe that even in the silence, God is loving me and working for some unseen good?

We wait for God to show up in the daily challenges of modern life; we also wait for the second coming of Christ.  We need God's promises just as much as the Jews did in the years prior to Christ's birth.  We need to ask God to help us avoid the busyness and cynicism that seems to numb pain and disappointment, but which also diminishes our capacity for joy.

I love the words to this hymn written by Charles Wesley.  Pray that God would give us the courage to stand still in the midst of silence and wait with the expectancy that Jesus always comes for His children.

"Come Thou long expected Jesus,
Born to set Thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us;
Let us find our rest in Thee.
Israel's strength and consolation,
Hope of all the earth Thou art;
Dear desire of every nation,
Joy of every longing heart."