Q: How do you know when your prayers are answered?
A: When nothing happens!
Oswald Chambers seems to be saying something similar to this very thing when he writes:If God is taking us into the understanding that prayer is for the glorifying of His Father, He will give us the first sign of His intimacy—silence. The devil calls it unanswered prayer.
On the surface, this is perplexing.
The most fitting response I can make to Oswald Chambers’ assertion is to say, There are silences and there are silences. Otherwise, we are left with the nonsensical concept that if we want God’s answers to prayer, we can get them now—without praying. Silence that is broken by prayer and then resumes hardly seems consequential. But what if there are different kinds of silence?
When I was a youngster, I would lounge around on humid August days, listening to the radio, shooting free throws in our driveway, doing whatever—until I exhausted all conceivable recreational possibilities. Then I might go flop down in the grass and wait for something, anything, to happen. It would be hot, boring, and—besides the occasional car or friend approaching—it would be quiet. This is one kind of silence: the silence of nothing happening.
The other kind has been described in various ways. Chaim Potock touches on it in The Gift of Asher Lev:How velvety the silence, how feather-soft the stillness of calmly anticipated astonishments!
We’ve all felt something like this. An expectant quiet emerges, a silence that is merely the veneer for fascinating activity—the precursor to a gasp or an exclamation. I feel it as a kind of hushed drama on cold winter nights, when I walk outside and see snowflakes spiraling out of a moonlit sky. All around me, something is happening. Or something has just happened, or is about to. In the delicious air of excitement, distinctions like these run together.
A silence of this second kind is rare, and it creates something else: an internal quiet. As C.S. Lewis says, “There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.” Real, holistic quiet, then, is all the more desirable. Sometimes it takes a very big thing or a very surprising event to trick us into observing it.
This is why prayer to GOD can end in silence. When Christ approaches, his presence makes words and questions of secondary importance. We prayed for one thing—maybe we asked a single, desperate question—and we find ourselves getting something unexpected in return.
We may find ourselves standing in a kind of spiritually-created vacuum, with the constant questions of life extracted. In their place is something we are not accustomed to. Mysterious, huge, a charged stillness. Perhaps we sense great spaces stretching away, but the expanse is listening. It is linked to our heartbeat. There is a gigantic meaning in the absence of speech, but we are not sure yet what it is. If we wait, and listen, and trust, we will learn the secret meaning. In the meantime, we are tempted to simply call it “silence.”
Sometimes, silence is just the way we describe a nearby God when we have not yet learned to see him.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Mysterious Answers to Prayer
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1 comments:
Wow, AJ, that was a wonderful post! I had been thinking about how to reconcile Chambers' statement since you originally posed it, but I never came up with anything as satisfying as you did. Your thoughts on the topic made me shiver!
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