God Is Not Silent (the story behind These Saints)

I’ve been working on this album for over a year. You probably already know that. This is what happens when a phlegmatic/melancholy/procrastinator gets put at the helm of a project and starts obsessing over details. I was hoping to have These Saints released this week, but we’re just not there yet. I thought I’d give you a word about the heart of the project and the journey I’ve walked while writing the songs on the album.

Be looking for a behind-the-scenes video coming up shortly. Go ahead and pre-order the album now. :-)

GOD IS NOT SILENT

When I was three or four my cousin told me that the thunder that shook the heavens during the midwestern summer storms that frequented my Indiana hometown was the laughter of God Himself. 

And I believed him.  

After all, the young seed of my faith was being planted in nutrient-rich soil. I knew the hymns by heart. I was an every-service-regular, sitting on the second-to-the-front pew, pretending the back of the pew in front of me was a piano and I was the church pianist. Some of my fondest memories include waking up on a church pew and hearing the saints praying at the front of the church, or bundling up in dark winter months and heading to the church for early morning prayer meetings and once at the church, lying on the blue carpet surrounded by cousins and pillows and blankets as our parents prayed revival to pass. 

God’s laughter being audible didn’t seem unreasonable. 

You’d think a young heart so fed and nurtured and cultivated would always find it easy to believe in a God Who is not silent. 

But I haven’t. 

I remember in high school studying about great minds in American’s history who saw the universe as a kind of Clock that had been orderly designed and put together and wound up by a great Watch Maker. And after tightly winding the Clock, the Watch Maker had turned His back and walked away, leaving the Clock to continue ticking on its own. As a teenager studying American literature, Deism seemed distant and strange. 

The God I’d been introduced to was imminent and tangible and He spoke to people. And if you listened real close, you just might hear Him laughing in the thunder.

But there came an inexplicably hazy night on my spiritual journey when the concept of a Watch Maker with His back turned on this Ticking Clock seemed quite reasonable and very possibly true. 

Francis Schaeffer once said, “God is not silent.” Sometimes you can be awfully close to that Laughing Thunder and it can seem mocking and aloof. Sometimes the surrounding sounds of the saints you’ve grown to love your entire church-going life can sound fake and distant and deceived. 

I don’t speak of my doubts because I’m searching or because I need a place to sort. I speak openly because I’m convinced I walk frighteningly close to precious people who are laid low with doubts and accusations and cynicism not too far removed from my own. 

And the God Who laughed in the thunder when I was a kid, the God Who I heard in the services as I slept on church pews, the God I’d given my entire life to as a 9-year-old kid after my pastor-daddy preached his Sunday sermon, the God I thought was like the Watch Maker with His arms crossed as His world ticked behind Him — that God was strangely silent on that hazy night. 

You can spend a lot of your life on a church platform and find it hard to believe the words you’ve always taken as truth. You can be sitting in a church full of saints and not be able to hear their voices for the screaming lies that are pounding in your own head. You can be reading your Bible and praying every day and thorny questions can seep into the soil of a young seed and start to choke out its life. 

I knew I was being audacious and taking risks and didn’t deserve a response. But I dared this Silent God to prove Himself to me. Me, the one who saw Him as a kind-of distant Watch Maker, unconcerned with the Ticking Clock He’d put together.

This Watch Maker God didn’t speak to me. He didn’t push back the doubts with a sense of His ever-present Spirit. He didn’t give me a promise from His inerrant Word to hold to. 

It’s also important to mention that He didn’t rebuke me or ask me how I dared to make such demands. 

Instead of this God responding like I wanted — Him reaching into the ticking and rearranging the spokes and wheels and screws and rewinding things to their proper place — instead of Him responding like He should have, by reminding me that I’d been blessed by a lifetime of evidences of Him — instead I found this silent, distant God incarnated in the hands and feet and tears of His people. 

They became the presence of Christ to me. I cannot tell you many of their names. I don’t even know if some of them know who I am. Several were ordinary people who sat across the aisle from me in church. Many of them our paths crossed only briefly, but in those moments I sensed Sweet Oil and became convinced that the Sweet is stronger than the bitter. But all of them gathered close and lit fires to keep me warm and covered me with their prayers and carried me in my weakness and encircled me in their fellowship, disbelieving and doubting though I was. 

And Schaeffer was right. God is not silent. Sometimes He laughs in the thunder. Sometimes His presence is so close you can feel it, though no words are uttered for comfort.

But sometimes He speaks through the presence of His people. 

And the thunder rolls overhead and the saints sing the songs I know by heart and God is ever-present among His people. 

Image: Sarah Broadmeadow-Thomas