Have you ever felt like God was silent? Like your prayers were caught in the rafters? Have you ever asked God a question, only to hear silence in return? Does the silence frustrate you? Does it leave you feeling worried and confused? Does it make you question whether Abba is angry?
In Christian circles, we often talk about seasons and I frequently find that we use the term “season” to describe stages of life. For example, we talk about the season where our kids are young, the busy season where they are older and we are running to and fro to all of their activities, the empty nest season where they’ve flown the coop, and so the list goes.
Our walk with Christ also has seasons and these seasons mirror the pattern of seasons we find in nature. Spring is a season of new life where fresh growth rises. Our spirituality feels exciting in spring as truth hits us in a fresh way and we gain an understanding of concepts that we couldn’t quite grasp before. Summer is a bountiful season where we settle into the discoveries of spring and allow our hearts to flourish and grow. Autumn comes and we begin to harvest the fruit sown in the preceding seasons. Our hearts and lives have a solidity to them in autumn because roots have been established and even as we sense the change in seasons we have an assurance that the future is good.
Then there is winter. Just as Old Man Winter was thought to bring the cold, winter leaves us feeling spiritually chilly and dry. We can begin to feel abandoned by God as more questions than answers surface in our hearts. God’s voice seems nonexistent and far away at best.
Winter is where we learn to wait on the whispers of Abba.
His voice may not be as loud as it once was, but His Spirit is omnipresent and is still with us nonetheless. No amount of striving will end our winter. We cannot force God to speak. We cannot force many of our situations to change. In winter we must wait on the faithfulness of God as we remember that seasons don’t last forever. They are periods of time that serve a deeper purpose and only in returning to Abba during the winter will we discover that purpose.
As we learn to return again and again, even in the cold of winter, we discover that He is still speaking. He may be giving us a deep impression in our soul, rather than a specific set of words. He may draw us to a photograph, a flower, a song, or a psalm.
Only through returning to the stillness of His presence can we grow our awareness of His whispers. His whispers are no less sweet than His shouts. A person shouts across a field, but they whisper when they are cuddled close on the couch.
His whispers draw us closer and create an intimacy only the deepest companions experience.
So today I ask, are you waiting on His whispers? He is faithful, even in the quiet. What is He whispering to you today?
-Liz