Faith in Silence

Selfishly, I need to point out that those of you who are paying subscribers really make it possible for me to take a week off writing about politics to do this and I thank you tremendously and hope some of you who are not paying subscribers might join the effort.

How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? How long will your wrath burn like fire? 47  Remember how short my time is! For what vanity you have created all the children of man! 48  What man can live and never see death? Who can deliver his soul from the power of Sheol? Selah 49  Lord, where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David? 50  Remember, O Lord, how your servants are mocked, and how I bear in my heart the insults of all the many nations, 51  with which your enemies mock, O Lord, with which they mock the footsteps of your anointed. 52  Blessed be the Lord forever! Amen and Amen.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Ps 89:46–52). (2016). Crossway Bibles.

I have been trying to arrange a meeting for a couple of months with a person who is extremely difficult to get a meeting with. After some months of trying, four weeks ago he said he would call the next week. Three weeks ago, I never got a call, then an apology that he’d been tied up and a commitment to talk last week. Then he got sick and my wife got sick and neither of us could chat. We rescheduled for yesterday and his flight got delayed in all the awful weather, which put him on a plane in the air when we were to talk. Sometimes the devil just gets in the way and obstructs.

To him, the meeting is just a meeting with one of an extraordinary number of people he does not know who wants his attention. To me, if the meeting went in my favor, it’d be a help. I have prayed and prayed and prayed and here we are impeded by illness and storms.

Sometimes it seems like God isn’t listening or His will is not aligned with your own heart’s desires. Believe me, I understand that.

There are ample Psalms of David feeling abandoned. The portion above is from Ethan the Ezrahite, a Levite singer in King David’s court who was known for his wisdom. Try this one on for size:

Return, O Lord! How long? Have pity on your servants! 14  Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. 15  Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil. 16  Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. 17  Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Ps 90:13–17). (2016). Crossway Bibles.

That’s from Moses, feeling abandoned wandering the wilderness with the God of all creation along for the ride. Despite God dwelling in a tent and the Ark of the Covenant with him, Moses feels abandoned when he is very literally a few steps away from the living God.

I talked with a pastor friend the other day. He had heard another pastor point out that God is working in your life at this very minute in thousands of different ways, but you may only be aware of three or four of those ways and may not be aware of any. Just because you don’t see things go the way you want on the timeframe you want does not mean God is absent.

The week before Christmas in 2006, I lost my job on the same day my wife was given six months to live. We had a one year old. I had to be the one to look my wife in the eye and tell her she was dying.

She had a rare cancer that had spread through her body, into her lungs, and it was beyond cure. I had to tell her, then go get our baby from daycare, go home, get my baby out of the car with no energy left, then sat in the mud in the rain and cried with a one year old patting my face as if to tell me it would be okay.

I didn’t really feel like God was around. It was not okay.

I worked up the energy to get inside, get us cleaned up, and all I could do was pray. There really was no comfort in the prayers and I kept praying. At the hospital that night, my wife and I had all the sorts of conversations you never want to have.

Late that night, the surgeon who had done the biopsy on my wife’s lungs and discovered the cancer came in the room to tell us that upon further review, they actually weren’t sure it was cancer and would be sending it off to the Mayo Clinic. The Mayo Clinic confirmed her condition was benign.

In a few days, a company in Washington bought my company and I kept my job.

A few years later, my wife was ready to be a stay at home mom. We couldn’t make ends meet. I was on her insurance. I headed off to Dillards to get a second job selling clothes. We prayed and God answered quickly. My wife’s boss kept her on a few months more with minimal work and no cut in pay. I got a pay raise that was, to the penny, exactly my wife’s gross salary. Then CNN called and offered me a job. A year later, a local radio host got arrested in a crack house and I got asked to fill in for him on the local Cumulus station.

One day turned to one week and the host lost his job. One week turned to three months of radio for which I got paid in an expired gift certificate to Outback Steakhouse. Also, Herman Cain decided to run for president. It was not public news. But the head of his radio company heard me on the radio, thought it was my show, and offered me Herman’s job. I’ve been doing radio since January of 2011. I’ve filled in for Herman Cain, Neal Boortz, G. Gordon Liddy, Dana Loesch, and Rush Limbaugh, who already was a friend and then became a mentor. I went from late night, to evening drive in a year. Ten years later, I am now noon to three eastern on the most listened to talk station in the nation and twenty other stations to boot. Last year, more people were listening to me on the radio in Atlanta than any other program, music or talk.

There were times along the way that I would pray earnestly for things for my family, for myself, for my career, and in many of those cases God never seemed to answer, or at least did not answer on my schedule. But God has always been there and sometimes I must remind myself of the times God provided, often at the last minute so I would know it was him. He’s been ever present. I never expected to be doing radio and now cannot imagine not doing. God has a plan.

In the spring of 2016, I had very publicly said I would not vote for Donald Trump. Men showed up at our house to threaten us. My kids got bullied terribly in school and the school would do nothing. They were literally chased through a store by a man yelling at them that their father was destroying America by not supporting Trump.

I went to the doctor because I was always out of breath. It was allergies or maybe it was stress. The doctor sent me to the hospital for a CT scan. Next thing I knew they were rushing me into an ICU unit not expecting me to survive the night. My lungs had been filling up with blood clots. My blood oxygen was around eighty percent and falling. The head of the ICU unit saw my scans and asked if they’d taken the body to the morgue. That was me.

I was in that hospital for two weeks being treated like I was a stroke victim.

The very same day I got admitted to the ICU, the Mayo Clinic called and said they were pretty sure my wife had lung cancer. Had she not been misdiagnosed a decade before, they would have never caught it until it was too late. Her cancer is rare, genetic, and without a present medical cure. But she takes a pill each day that keeps the tumors from growing. The pill should work for two years. We are past the fifth year anniversary.

I am still here. She is still here. God has been very good to us — so good, each time I ask God for something else, I feel a sense of shame, of greed, of thinking he’s done enough and I should stop bothering him.

And now, here I am, praying for a meeting and a result, and illness and storms keep bringing delays and maybe it won’t happen or won’t happen in the way I want.

Through it all, I remind myself of all the times God has been there and also all the times God has been silent, but was working in ways I could not imagine at the time — in ways that provided for me and my family and provided more than what I was praying for.

I don’t expect the unbeliever to believe. They will see luck, coincidence, or chance. But I know it is the Lord because of that feeling — you who are believers know that feeling and you can’t describe it either. It is the feeling I wish the unbeliever could feel, that feeling scripture calls the peace that transcends all understanding — that feeling that if they experienced it they’d fall down and worship.

God is not the money bank. He’s not a sugar daddy. He’s not the genie in the bottle granting wishes. He is the God of all creation. We are made in his image and likeness and he provides all we need and more. He made the heavens and the earth. He holds the universe in his hands. He raised us from the dust of the earth and stitched us together in our mother’s womb. He laid down his life for us on a Friday and conquered death for us on Sunday. He is coming soon.

How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?

Blessed be the Lord forever! Amen and Amen.