Monday, May 24

Truly, you are a God who hides himself…
—Isaiah 45:15a

We have all felt it. We pray and hear no response, we look for comfort and find nothing but gnawing pain, we wait for direction but experience only cloudiness, we seek for faith and find doubt skirting us like a skulking coyote. 

All we have done in the past to call forth the presence of the Holy One does not seem to bring any response whatsoever. God has become absent; God is nowhere to be found; God has hidden.

But has God really hidden or is it that we are unable to see God because of the thick fog blurring our soul’s sight?

That fog creeps around us gradually, subtly, stealthily. We get busy and forget to pray, we get more concerned with having than giving, we allow work to crowd out the cry of our spirit, we loose our tongue in hurtful gossip, we become more interested in meeting our own needs than in showing love to others, we fill our days and nights with noise and find silence slipping away from us. We do not set out to wander away from the Holy One, but because we get diverted, our heart begins to forget how God is to be found.

God is as present as ever, but to see God, we need to take our heart to the space of silence. In that sacred place, the fog clears and our heart's memory is restored. And then we see, once again, that God was with us all along.

O God, wake me up when my life is closed in blindness to your presence.

These Signposts originally appeared on explorefaith in 2004.