This may be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through. And life hasn’t been a picnic.
My husband and I are trying to adopt, and I feel completely helpless as we jump through so many hoops. In addition to the mountains of paperwork, much of it redundant and all of it \ disorganized, we sit through hours upon hours of online courses steeped in whatever the latest fad was when they were created. So they’re outdated at best and downright harmful at worst. Fads move fast, even in parenting. But here we are, being told this is what good parents do. And I hear a quiet threat running through all of it: Agree with us, or we won’t give you kids.
It feels like the agency has all the power, and they wield without mercy. They give us quizzes at the end of each course, complete with questions like, “Did you disagree with anything from this lesson?” It feels like a gotcha, an excuse to throw away the piles of paperwork we’ve painstakingly completed over many months … not to mention the piles of money we’ve handed over.
After a particularly insulting course pushing ideas that were already moldy when we started this process, my stress levels cranked up to 11. And I couldn’t let it go. I prayed, went to bed, and woke up, still in knots.
I was tense at a soul level, and I sat down with my Bible to pray about it. And the thing that bothered me the most was the silence. And I sat there, in a pit of despair wondering, where was God?
There was a point in my life when I would pray about something, just pour out my heart with brutal honesty, and then walk into my day, light-hearted and refreshed, because I knew God was there. He’d heard me and was handling it. Things were hard, but I had God, so bring it on. Slowly, this has been changing. Now when I pray, I sit in ringing silence, and look around, wondering where God is. I walk into my life, trying to believe God still hears.
This is what I told God on that tense morning. Then I opened my Bible. Okay, wasn’t there a story about a guy who was all alone and surrounded by an army, then God opened his eyes to see the invisible army of God that surrounded him? Yes, there is, and it’s in 2 Kings 6. (And God’s army is made up of chariots of fire.)
While I was in Kings, I flipped over to the time Elijah challenged the prophets of a false god. I love this story. The false prophets build an altar, set up a sacrifice, and call on their god. Nothing happens. They even cut themselves and draw blood, but get crickets. Elijah builds a different altar, soaks it in water, then calls on his God — and fire falls and consumes the sacrifice, wood, stones, water – everything. Real dramatic, God-is-here stuff.
After this showstopper, a queen threatens Elijah’s life, and he runs away scared. Why was he scared? Here’s my theory. It sounds like God had told Elijah to challenge the false prophets with the whole altar thing. So he knew what he was supposed to do. But when the queen threatened to kill him, I bet Elijah didn’t hear anything from God. He got the silence. And so he ran, fearing for his life.
Elijah ends up in mountain cave, I think he’s waiting for God, and bunch of dramatic things happen: violent wind, an earthquake, fire. And there’s this refrain:
… but the Lord was not in the wind.
… but the Lord was not in the earthquake.
… but the Lord was not in the fire.
Then it says: “And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.” That’s when Elijah steps out and God speaks with him there. God was in the whisper.
But check this out: There’s a footnote on that whisper. It can be translated as “a sound, a thin silence.”
God was in the silence.
God is in the silence.