Waiting on God in the “Silent Years”

This morning at church, Pastor made an interesting observation: after Joseph’s lifetime, there was nothing recorded in Israel’s history for about 400 years. He posed the question, “Was God at work during those silent years?” His answer and mine is a resounding “Yes!”, but the fact remains that, historically speaking, while God was at work, He did not see fit to record any of His working during that period, making it easy to see that period as unimportant or insignificant.

Yet, if you know the Lord as I do, you know that He is ever present with His children. Even during those silent times, He would have been at work in millions of ways every day that encouraged the faithful among the Israelites. They may have been living in a “silent” period, waiting, watching, longing for the deliverance God had promised at the end of the 400 years, but God saw, God heard, and God loved them. He was present with them and purposeful in what He allowed, using even the difficulty of the years in slavery to prepare His people for the blessings to come. After all, if Egypt had been a place of freedom and prosperity, they would not have wanted to follow Moses across the wilderness --even for a land flowing with milk and honey.

 God often allows seasons of difficulties to make us willing to accept the blessings He has prepared for us later on. 

And those difficulties are sometimes “silent years” in our lives. They may span days, weeks, months, or years. They are periods of seemingly unimportant slogging along, not sure if we are accomplishing anything meaningful. Those are the times when one can doubt that God is at work. You may feel forgotten or left out as friends move freely down the pathways God has for them, as you stay still, seemingly stuck in a muddy patch on yours. But even in the muddy spots, God is there. Look for Him in the silence. Seek Him in the struggle. 

Let me tell you a story to illustrate. Once there was a young teen-aged girl who just might have been me. She lived out her Junior High years in an imaginary world of her own making, always imagining a different life, with different circumstances and different people.

 In High School, she began to grow up and somehow knew God wanted her to begin living in reality instead of trying to escape the ordinary, every-day life He had given her. As she looked around her, though, she realized that she was lonely. She had family who loved her, and she had friends she saw once in a while, but there was still something missing. 

She began to seek the Lord, beginning again to read through her Bible and, for the first time, praying regularly. She would get up very early and sit by the window of her upstairs bedroom like a princess in a tower, but instead of imagining a prince charming emerging from amongst the apple trees, she now began to revel in the beauty of her moment-by moment reality: the way the light painted the leaves, how lovely the gentle breeze was that blew in from the open window, the joyful sound of robins singing as if to celebrate the new day, the truths she was learning as she sat there reading God’s Word. 

After a while, she began to realize that God was showing His love to her every day in small, sweet, thoughtful ways. Sometimes it was sending a bird to sing to her on a particularly dreary day, another time it was a yard full of her favorite flowers which she had never noticed before, even though she walked past it nearly every day. Another time a whole string of traffic stopped to let her across the street when she wasn’t feeling well but had to walk to piano lessons anyway.

Bit by bit, she began to see God at work and the more she saw His love, the more she looked for Him. And the more she looked for Him, the more she found Him, right there, showing His love for her again and again. And soon her loneliness began to lessen, and she began to find that God is enough, even for the routine of daily life during a seemingly insignificant and unimportant season of life.

I won’t say that the girl was never lonely again, or that she always had that sense of closeness to the Lord every minute of the rest of her life, but I will say that whether or not she saw it at the time, God has always been right there with her, showing His love just the same whether or not she thought to look for it. 

“Draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you” James 4:8a