As a follower of Christ for over 30 years, I continue to be amazed by God's timing.  It is rare that I can make sense of His timing in the moment.  It isn’t until I look back and contemplate the events of the days, weeks, months and sometimes years that I come to realize God’s timing is perfect.  Like many, I live a fast paced busy life and if I am not careful, I can be active from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed.  Over the last four months, I have sensed a calling on my life to take time to contemplate God’s timing.  To me this means to be more observant, watchful and expectant of God’s work in my life and in order to answer this call, it requires me to slow down.

About four months ago, a friend shared her pain and confusion of not experiencing God’s presence.  She was a committed Christian and seeking after God.  She described her experience as God being silent.  She didn’t know what to make of it but I understood what she meant because I have experienced the silence of God.  Sadly, I sometimes interpreted the silence as a statement that God was unhappy with me.  So what did I do?  I began to ask questions, talk to God and fill up the emotional and spiritual space with my words.  Could it be that I was too busy crying, questioning, and telling God something that I didn’t leave any room for Him to speak?

Two months ago during an out of state trip, I met several colleagues for dinner.  We ended up discussing what it meant to hear from God.  This was a very deep conversation but I walked away with a very simple yet profound perspective.  I was reminded that God wants to speak with me, but have I really invited him to do so?  Prayer has become about me talking to God rather than with Him.  The difference between talking with versus to is a matter of stopping and listening.  Ironically, I practice and teach listening skills every week.  However in a personal prayer time, I’ve noticed that about one minute of silence is about all I tolerate until I start talking again or thinking about something else.  It’s as if I assumed that if God really wanted to say something important, He would break into my everyday world and announce it.

Before leaving, my colleague handed me a professional journal to read on the flight home.  I really wasn’t up to reading anything deep but half way through the flight I changed my mind.  To my amazement, the journal was solely devoted to ‘contemplative prayer”.  I couldn’t put it down.  I was especially struck by a quote from James Finley’s book called Christian Meditation. He referred to the silence that my friend and I were familiar with as the “dark night of the soul”.  Finley stated that this is the “time in which God weans us away from our tendency to base our security and identity on anything less than God" (p. 137).  He goes onto say in an interview the following:

“With respect to our emotions, it can be said that it is surely a gift to feel God’s presence in our lives, to have a devotional sense of God’s personal love for us.  But because these emotions are finite, they are infinitely less than the infinite love of God that God wishes to infuse into our hearts.  And so God brings us into a dark night in which we are weaned off our customary sense of God’s nearness.  The well goes dry….a person going through the dark night feels the loss or his or her customary sense of God’s nearness, but at the same time feels open and free.  The person senses something very mysterious and important is happening as modes of understanding are being transformed from human to divine.” (p. 22)

As these words jumped off the pages, I immediately began to wonder if God was preparing me for a dark night.

Not more than a week or so later, I experienced a painful event.  I was shaken.  I lost confidence.  I felt helpless.  I went to God.  There was silence.  Yet the silence wasn’t so scary because God used my colleagues to provide a different perspective.  The silence was an act of infinite love.  Now I had an opportunity to respond differently.  I could learn to sit in silence.  No talking.  I had to reign in my thoughts.  I sat and sat.  I even fell asleep!  I was just like the disciples in the Garden.  I sat in silence again, waiting.  I wept.

During this time, I relearned the necessity to listen with anticipation.    I had a greater “God” consciousness.  I was free from coming up with the answer to my pain and confusion.  I knew that God was God and this silence was purposeful.  At an unexpected moment during a conversation with my friend, I experienced His voice speaking to me about gentleness.  In a moment, I experienced clarity around the painful event and God’s silence.  The experience was consistent with the scripture “And you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” John 8:32.   It was as if the blinders were taken off.  Everything was clear, the 6 weeks of darkness were gone.  I was flooded with understanding and a new sense of God’s faithfulness.  I knew a deeper level of God’s love.  I felt free.

The dark night is over and sitting in silence this morning was comforting.  I marveled how drastic the experience was from where I started.  Ironically, I received a request to address the issue of contemplative prayer for a newsletter.  Had it been 24 hours earlier, it would have been something from a book and not from personal experience. His timing is always perfect.

Is it possible that the timing of this article is to encourage you to embrace God’s silence as a gift?  Learning how to sit in silence with God and listen with anticipation has the potential of deepening your understanding of His faithfulness and love.  This is the practice of contemplative prayer.  The following suggestions will help you get started:

• ‡        Set aside a time to pray on a consistent basis.
• ‡        Be realistic with how much you can do in a week.
• ‡        As you enter a time of prayer, ask the Lord to be with you.  Ask for His strength, protection, and perseverance through this dark night.
• ‡        Confess, make requests and offer praise to God.
• ‡        Allow a time for silence.
• ‡        Consider resting wordlessly in prayer.  In the beginning it may only be about one minute but can extend to longer periods.
• ‡        As outside thoughts come to you, briefly acknowledge them and attend back to focusing on God.

‡        As you experience God in a new way, remember Hebrew 13:8 “Jesus is the same, yesterday, today and forever”.  Is your experience leading to the development of the Fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self control - Galatians 5:22)?  Is it consistent with God’s character as demonstrated in the Bible?   If so, embrace, celebrate and give praise to God.

After the dark night has passed, continue the practice of contemplation – the practice of listening with anticipation.

The Apostle Paul, known for a rich personal prayer life sums it up in his moving prayer for the Ephesians:

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:16-20 (The New International Version, 1984).