The Awful Silence

The Biblical story has some scenes of awful silence.  Abraham suffered through such a silence that day on Mt. Moriah after he tied his only son, Isaac, to the altar.  Hopefully, the boy had something placed over his eyes to keep him from seeing his father unsheathing his knife and raising it into the air.  The knife raised into the air was raised into a silence that surely must have stretched from the edge of one horizon to the other.  The old man must have been looking everywhere but down at his outstretched son as he paused with the knife suspended in the silence of the moment.  What he was going to do he was going to do, but how he must have hoped deep in his soul for a voice that would break the awful silence and spare a father a grief that would never heal.

 

Moments of awful silence invade our lives as well.  Some of them come to us because of our faithfulness to God.  However, some come suddenly and unexpectedly leaving us without a voice to speak or one to hear.  Who can understand why God appears to us as the Silent One when our hearts are broken by the hard demands of life?  Who can fathom a Father who is able to be silent when His child is broken, desperate, and being overcome by a deep darkness?  Who can figure out why the One who sends seems like One who has turned aside to other things when the One sent is suffering?

 

We are told by many who have walked the road ahead of us that we should be seekers of the silence.  We are told God makes Himself known and that His voice can be heard in the silence heard only by the soul.  But, it can be an awful silence.  It can turn into a moment when it seems that we stand so alone that not even the angels of heaven can touch us.  There are those times when God puts us into places not of our own choosing, or perhaps, allows us to walk into it only because it is where obedience takes us.  Like Abraham on Mt. Moriah, or Jesus on Calvary, we may find ourselves in the midst of a silence so awful that there is no option left to us but to trust in a God who cannot be seen, or heard, or understood.