A Jon Post
There’s a moment. I don’t really know how to describe it. It comes after a prayer, a Bible study, a tear, or a simple breaking of the soul.
It’s the silence of God.
I’ve prayed and cried with a man who holds his dying son in his arms and looks at me and asks me what he should do. He has just heard from his wife that another of his children in his distant home is in the hospital. “What should I do Jon? I can’t go home and leave my son here at the hospital, and my wife cannot watch over my other children while one is in the hospital. What should I do?”
So we pray and cry and wait.
And we’re answered by the silence of God.
See it’s easy to walk into a place of suffering with stories of overcoming obstacles, deliverance, and God’s goodness in times of trouble. But how am I supposed to look into the one good eye of a boy who is about to return home with a tumor hanging over his other eye because the one hospital in the country with chemotherapy is out of its chemotherapy treatment. What do I say to this boy of hope?
And the silence of God hangs thick and it nearly freezes the tears to our cheeks.
Andrew Peterson, a singer/songwriter said this:
There's a statue of Jesus on a monastery knoll In the hills of Kentucky, all quiet and cold And He's kneeling in the garden, as silent as a Stone All His friends are sleeping and He's weeping all alone And the man of all sorrows, he never forgot What sorrow is carried by the hearts that he bought So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
I think Jesus knows what the Silence of God feels like. I think He’s intimately acquainted with the torture of the soul that comes with a desperate prayer and the inky blackness that drapes over the heart in response.
I think Jesus hasn’t forgotten the sorrow that Albano, Marçelino and Rosina carry.
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.(Isaiah 53:3)
Wow… a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
See, I may not understand what my friends in oncology go through. I may not be able to wrap my mind around the intensity of the pain that they experience every day, hour, and ticking second in their beds.
But the man of sorrows does. He does. He’s familiar with their suffering.
What other God could I turn to than this? What other God answers sorrow and suffering, not by waving a magic wand and making us all smile and making it all go away… but by joining us in it.
Christ Jesus… the man of sorrows. He knows deeply the silence of God.