Nothing Happened, It Just Went Quiet

There is no story here and that is the whole difficulty.

She did not fall out with God. There was no crisis, no betrayal, no funeral she never got over, no doctrine that came apart in her hands at two in the morning. Nobody hurt her in a church. She was not disappointed by a prayer that went unanswered, and she can tell you honestly that she has no complaint.

It just went quiet.

She thinks it began around the time the youngest left, but she says that without confidence, because it did not begin on a day. It is more that at some point she looked up and noticed that she could not remember the last time she had sensed Him near, and then could not remember when she had last noticed noticing.

That was four years ago. It has been quiet since.

She still goes. She has not stopped anything. She reads in the mornings and the words are the same words and they land like a page. She sings on Sunday and she means the sentences and nothing rises. There is no bitterness in her about it at all, which is somehow the loneliest part, because bitterness would at least be a temperature.

And this is what she has concluded, in the absence of any other explanation.

She thinks He went.

Not in anger. She does not think He was driven off, because she cannot find the thing that would have driven Him. She thinks He simply moved on, the way people do, quietly, without announcing it, and that some are kept and some are not and she turned out not to be.

She has never said that to a living soul. What would she say. Nothing happened.

And that is you at your own kitchen window, or you would not still be reading.

The psalm was written by somebody who went looking

I want to give you a psalm that most people meet as a comfort and which is not one, not at first. It is a man testing something, and the test is exactly yours.

Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!Psalm 139:7-8

Read what he is doing. He is not celebrating. He is running the experiment. He is going through the possible locations one at a time, the highest and then the lowest, trying to find the place that is outside, and he cannot construct one.

And notice which places he chooses. Not the pleasant ones. Sheol is the pit, the far end, the place a person goes when everything has been stripped off them. And the answer that comes back from that address is the same three words as the answer from heaven. You are there.

You have not found the outside of His presence, and the psalm was written by a man who tried harder than you have. It is written, where shall I go from Your Spirit, or where shall I flee from Your presence (Psalm 139:7). The Holy Spirit has been at the kitchen window for four years with a woman who could not feel Him there.

Now let me say the thing about the quiet, and I will say it plainly because you have been given theories before and none of them fitted.

You reasoned that an absence needs no cause when there was no offense: He simply moved on. But that reasoning has a hidden step in it, and the step is the assumption that His nearness is something you would detect. Four years of not detecting is only evidence of absence if the presence is the sort of thing that always registers, and this psalm says it registers in Sheol, which is precisely the address where a person feels nothing at all.

You are not one of the ones who was not kept, and the quiet is not a decision He made about you. It is written that if I make my bed in Sheol, You are there (Psalm 139:8), which puts Him at the exact address where nothing can be felt. The Holy Spirit does not withdraw from the ones who stop sensing Him.

And let me put the last of it down with nothing hanging off the end, because you have spent four years waiting for the sentence that begins with but.

He is here. Now. In the room you are reading this in. Not returning, not being persuaded, not coming back once something in you warms up again.

You are not cast off, and there is no condition anywhere attached to that. It is written that He has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and there is no clause in it about the ones who go quiet. The Holy Spirit stayed through four years in which you could not tell, and He is in the same room as you tonight.