When God is Silent
by: Heidi McLaughlin
I don’t like silence. It feels awkward and makes me feel overlooked and forgotten. It’s especially difficult when I facilitate a meeting or Bible study and ask an important question that needs results. And when there is an uncomfortable silence, I question myself: Am I doing it wrong? Am I overlooking something important? What’s going on here? It’s even harder when God is silent. Our beseeching prayers hitting a concrete ceiling when we’re on the cusp of something important, needing direction and answers.. And there’s nothing; a vacuum.
The idiom “nature abhors a vacuum” is a dangerous concept when it comes to seeking God’s answers. Vacuums are empty places that are void of matter and demand to be filled. To move forward, we do anything to fill answers with our weakling power and short-sighted wisdom. I tried filling God’s vacuum in the ‘1990s’. It was the train to nowhere.
My speaking ministry was flourishing, and it was exciting how God was using me to speak hope and life into people’s lives. By word of mouth, one speaking engagement led to the next and I couldn’t wait until I was known as a coveted “international speaker.” That was my goal, and I was on fire to move forward. Suddenly, it all stopped. I tried to fill the vacuum by making calls, contacts, and offering free events. Nothing. Nada. I had to let my speaking ministry go.
Over the next six years, God was eerily silent. But something else was happening. My husband, Jack, and I got involved in a ministry in our church called “Oasis”, a place for hurting singles through divorce, death or never having been married. I was deep in the trenches with people who were broken, lonely, recovering from various issues of abuse and various stages of grief. I felt ill-equipped for dishing out life-giving answers and I had to press into God for His wisdom. And I had to learn how to pray. Not little “bullet” prayers that I shot up now and then for quick answers, but prayers that reached the heart of God to find solutions for wholeness.
For over a year I took a prayer-counselling course where God taught me how to reach the spiritual heart of His lost and broken people. During these years, when I mopped up the blood from so many broken hearts, I didn’t know it then, but God was transforming my heart. He was changing my heart of sympathy to a heart of empathy. I had to learn to “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15 NIV). For me to speak to the nations, my heart had to become like Jesus’ in Matthew 9:36. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd”.
God was not silent. He was in the background, performing miracles in my heart. He was teaching me how to love like Jesus to prepare me to speak to the nations with compassion. To take on His mantle of humility and servanthood. To be filled with Him instead of filling my own vacuum of pride, a self-seeking and goal-focused mission.
Those 6 years of being in the trenches with broken people were a gift from God, and it taught me that. Over the next 18 years, God took me internationally across North American, Europe and eventually into South America.
God is never silent. If you’re at a point in your life where you feel God has abandoned you or your dreams, remember that when you think He’s not working, He’s unfolding His most magnificent miracles.
Heidi speaks all over North America and overseas, and is an award-winning author. She has experienced much tragedy, but has learned how to recapture her JOY. Her latest book is FRESH JOY! Heidi has been widowed twice and is mom and step-mom of a blended family of 5 children and 12 grandchildren.
Website: www.heartconnection.ca
IG: heidiheart99
Twitter: heidiheart