The Quiet I Started Reading As An Answer

The quiet started out being nothing.

That is what a silence is, when it begins. An absence. A thing that has not happened yet. It does not mean anything, because absences do not mean things, and for the first year or so she understood that perfectly well.

Then, somewhere in the second year, it started meaning something.

Not because anybody told her. Nobody has ever said a word to her about it and if they had she would have argued. The meaning grew by itself, in the dark, the way ivy gets into brickwork, and by the third year it was load bearing.

Here is what the quiet now says. She could not tell you when it started saying it.

He has heard, and He has decided, and this is the decision.

That is a translation. That is a person taking a blank space and reading a sentence off it, and once you have a sentence you can act on it, and she has been acting on it for two years.

She prays differently now. Shorter. More carefully, in the way you speak to somebody you think you have offended. She has stopped putting anything new before God because she does not want another one of these.

And she has become, in a way that nobody around her has noticed, very slightly braced. All the time. In everything.

So let me ask you.

What have you decided the quiet is saying?

The line Jesus quoted has a second verse

Everybody knows the first line of Psalm 22, because Jesus said it out loud from the cross and it is one of the most terrible sentences in human history.

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?

Almost nobody reads the next verse, and the next verse is the one you need.

My God, I cry out by day, but You do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.Psalm 22:2

Sit with the fact that this is in the Bible.

A man, entirely faithful, writes down that he calls out in the day and gets no answer and calls out at night and gets no peace. It is preserved. It is set to music. It is sung by the whole congregation. And then, a thousand years later, the Son of God takes that psalm on His own lips at the worst moment there has ever been.

Now here is what I want you to notice, and it is a small thing that changes everything.

The psalm does not translate the silence.

Read it. He describes the silence at length. He says it is happening. He is honest to the point of being uncomfortable about how it feels and how long it has gone on.

He never once says what it means.

He does not write and therefore You have judged me. He does not write and this is Your answer. He is a poet and he has all the words in the world available to him and he does not use one of them to turn the quiet into a message.

Because he knows something you have stopped knowing, which is that a silence is not a text.

Hear where that puts you, and hear it gently, because you have been braced for two years and you are tired.

You are not living under a decision. Scripture puts I cry out and You do not answer into a psalm and never once has the psalmist explain what the not answering means, and the Holy Spirit never once communicated a verdict by saying nothing.

And I want to name the specific damage, because it is not the sadness. You could survive the sadness.

It is that you have stopped bringing Him new things. That is what the translation cost. You built a sentence out of a blank space, and then you organized your whole relationship with God around a sentence He never said, and now you speak to Him like a woman who has been told off for something she cannot remember doing.

The word says the psalm ends with that same man declaring God's name to his brothers and praising Him in the assembly, and nothing has been explained by then either.