Oh, I know the pat answers. You just aren’t listening. You just need to have faith. We have the Holy Ghost. I’ve given those answers enough times in my life. I know them well, but they don’t work for me anymore.
In the Bible, there is the “400 years of silence”–the time between the last prophet and Jesus’ birth. Yet even during that 400 years, there were things happening and indications of God’s presence with his people. Those things just aren’t recorded as books in our Bibles.
But now… for 2000 years, there’s been silence. Through inquisitions and crusades and witch hunts, through false teaching and koolaid, sex scandals and embezzlement. Yes, surely God is with us. But the overall silence is sometimes deafening.
We were taught in my former church that if the leader was wrong, God would take care of it. We were not to confront, not to question… and never to leave. So we stayed, to our own hurt and to the hurt of our families. Finally some things were brought to light and the man who taught that disappeared. Yet whether that was God or not, is not mine to answer. What I do wonder is if he did step in, why didn’t he step in sooner, so that fewer people would have been hurt? And if we are Jesus’ hands and feet, why didn’t we move to do something to stop what was happening ourselves? I know we were scared and confused and in a strong delusion of sorts, believing him even as he slandered God, yet still, I wish we had done something.
Maybe God is silent because we are. Maybe he’s waiting on us. Or maybe he’s just silent. I know I’ve tried to listen, even been desperate to hear, and have longed for the time, long past, when I thought I could hear his voice. The silence is deafening.
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Author: Through Grace
I was raised in a somewhat unhealthy church group within the Nondenominational Christian Church. After graduating high school, I began attending a United Pentecostal Church (UPC). I've been a member of four UPC churches and visited many others. Of the four of which I was a member, I was "encouraged" not to leave the first and then later sent to the second; attended the second where an usher repeatedly attempted to touch me and the pastor told me I should not care about the standards of the organization and was wrong to do so; ran to a third at that point, which threw me out after a couple years; and walked out of a fourth. For these transfers and because I refused to gossip about my former churches, some called me a "wandering star, a cloud without water" (Jude 1:12).
I love the fact that when the blind man was healed, questioned by the Pharisees and temple rulers, and expelled from the temple, Jesus went and sought him out. He very rarely did this once someone was healed, but for this man, he did. I believe God has a special place in his heart for those who are abused, wrongfully accused, or condemned by religious leadership. I believe He loves those who are wronged by churchianity--yes, churchianity, not Christianity, because those who do these wrongs follow a church, not Christ.
1 John 4:7-8
7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.
10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
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I wish I had an answer for that question too. But I do know, according to scripture, that God does hear our prayers and collects our tears in vials. So we do not go unnoticed but when we are trapped in an abusive church and our faith has been squeezed so tight that it is hard to believe there is a God. But once I escaped the abusive power that had hold of me I started spending time in nature. As I released the bad I could see God in the babbling brook and once again remember that if I didn’t praise Him the very rocks would cry out. It took me awhile before I could say a word of praise. So he continued to show me his creation of the birds and how much he cared for the sparrow and how much more he cared for me. I remembered more and more of his word coming to me pure and simple from him. He showed me my lilies and I remembered how they neither toiled or sow but he arrayed them in beauty. Slowly with patience he wooed me back to him not church but to him. He sent his love to me even when I could not say a word back to him. It took me six months before I could say a word of praise to him but when I started it was like a floodgate opened and words began to flow and healing began. God is patient when we’ve been hurt. He does understand. And I know it makes him sad when men abuse their calling but Karma does come full circle in Gods time.