Episode #265 - The Power of Silence

When the Lord is silent is when I most listen in my life.  I have found that silence brings blessings given time and effort.

Transcript

Episode #265 – The Power of Silence.  Before I get too deep this week.  I want to recognize that today is Easter.  The celebration of the resurrection of the Son of God to his rightful place.  I hope today that you feel his presence in your life.  That in spirit and in testimony you feel the prints of the nails in his feet and hands.  That you see him ascending the hill to Gethsemane and then again to Golgotha. And there you see him forgiving the soldiers who nailed him to the cross, giving his mother’s care to an apostle, crying out asking why the Father has forsaken him.  I hope you see his body wrapped in linen and laid in a sepulcher and the gloriously resurrected.  For the reality of the gospel is in him and in his loving mercy and spiritual touch.  I hope that you look forward to that day when you will see him face to face and here those loving words well done thou good and faithful service, enter into your rest. 

I have struggled in the spirit a great deal these last two weeks.  Writing is sometimes more of an art of the spirit rather than a science or a function of AI.  To be able to say the right thing and the right time can be difficult.  I have pondered much about the suffering of the saints and their love of the Savior.  Sometimes, many times, it just doesn’t seem fair that so many carry such deep burdens of hurt, pain and emotional turmoil.  Beyond our suffering, there are moments when we feel the silence of the Lord.  We look to our Savior and we feel the silence as much as we recognize it.  Those moments of silence are painful, profoundly so.  Why do they come?  What purpose does it serve the Lord to stand silent as we pray for help?  Why not answer our every prayer at the moment we speak it.  If we have the faith and have done our part, don’t we deserve an answer and within a timely timeframe.  

There is an older country song sung by Garth Brooks called unanswered prayers.  It talks about a young man desperate to win the love of a young woman who he thought was the one.  That one person who would make all the difference in his life. He prays that the Lord of heaven and earth could spare a moment and allow her to fall in love with him.  It didn’t happen and as he is looking back to this moment in his life 20 years later at a reunion and then looking at the wife he now has, he realized why the Lord was silent.  If he had answered that prayer, the blessings he now had wouldn’t have been realized.  Now this is one instance, but there exist many reasons the Lord does not answer our deepest desires and it has to do with the power of silence.

What are silent moments?  Those times when the heavens seem to be closed.  We do not feel as though we are receiving revelation, comfort, peace or anything of the Savior.  We feel adrift, lost from his view.  We cry out into a darkness that never seems to end and all we hear are the loud rumblings or our own emotions telling us that there exists no value in crying out.  He does not hear you and will not help you.  Silent moments are those reaching out feelings with a specific desire and where we don’t immediately hear back what we are seeking.  The answer is not yes or no or even wait.  There just isn’t an answer.  

Well the brain, our mortal brain, really cannot handle this void of information.  And so often in silence we begin to make up answers for the Lord.  Maybe he really wants me to do this.  Or maybe he really wants me to do that.  So often these are those desires we have welling up to reach the status of divine intervention without the authority.  Essentially, our mind reaches for what it needs an answer.  So often when the silence comes we are entirely baffled that the Lord would not even utter a sentence towards our desperate plea.

What do we do when we face silence in our lives?  When the heavens appear closed?  When the darkness presses in upon us and through those pressing feelings we cry out, “Oh God where art thou and where is the pavilion that hideth thy face.”  We see only pain, suffering, and a loss of hope.  Perhaps our loss of hope is really the reason for the darkened heavens.  Without hope we struggle to see even a faint glimmer of light.  That is why mental and emotional difficulties are so hard to overcome.  They remove our peace of mind and remove our hope and lasting joy.

Actually, there are many reasons why the heavens might be silent to us.  I personally have seen many dark days where I have said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”  We find these silent moments in the scriptures at the end of the Savior’s garden experience and again at the end of the cross experience.  Even he calls out “My God, My God, Why hast thou forsaken me.”  His words penetrate my soul as I have experienced this silence and know of its power in our lives.  We will all experience the soul rending phrase, “O God where art thou” many times in our lives if we are on the path to exaltation.  We cannot experience exaltation without them.   Silence brings clarity, truth, purity to the table.  In the silence we measure our faith, grow our faith, define who we are and what we want to be.  It peals back the layers we have built and reveals us as we are and where we stand in our faith.  Patience after all is a measure of celestial nature.  Patience brings the clarity and definition we need.  It keeps us humble for much longer and in a greater readiness to hear the truth of things as they really are.

So silence has its purposes and divine origins.  We too often think that the Lord doesn’t care, is not concerned with our life, has not heard us because we are too sinful, too prideful, too dependent, too weak.  That it is our fault, that he cannot hear the pleadings of our heart.  It is important to remember that the hearing of the prayer and the answering are two very different things.  The Lord hears prayers and more especially those prayers made in times of what seems heavenly silence.  He is cautious and careful about those moments for he knows that while they can be a springboard into eternity, they can also be a stumbling block into strange roads.  And yet we see that he uses these moments of silence regularly in our lives.  It is one indication that we are on the right path.  When the Savior brings us to a moment of silence, we should note it carefully.  This is a teaching moment, a moment when significant revelation comes.  We see this with the Prophet Joseph Smith as he received some of the most powerful revelations during his ministry right after one of these moments of revelation silence in Liberty Jail.

But what does such a trial teach us.  When we are in that moment of revelation silence, when we cannot seem to hear the soothing voice of the Lord, what do we learn.  Our first lesson is pure patience.  Afterall patience with a promise of healing is not the same as patience without an end and no revelation to guide us.  Patience in a moment of spiritual silence is pure as the driven snow.  It relies only on the belief and faith that God is listening and that answers do eventually come.  Timing is the Lord’s sorting of the wheat and chaff. The wheat bears the silence and the moment, while the chaff tends to drift with the wind to other places.  The timing of the Lord is really his measure of our willingness and readiness to accept new and defining revelation.  In my life when revelation has been scarce, I have always had an abundance after the trial has passed.  But bearing the moments of silence is no easy task.  When silence came to the Savior, even he cried out in his extremities asking why he had been forsaken.  Did he know the answer, yes.  But he cried out anyway because of the emotion that is invoked by such a deep loss of connection.

We often cry out the same.  But truly exaltation comes by patient learning.  Yes there are other reasons why the Lord may not answer a prayer and remain silent.  He may want us to make our own decision and then bring it to him.  There may be more than one good path and you might be choosing between two good options.  The Lord does not care which you take.  We often see this in our career paths and other types of more worldly type decisions.  The Lord cares very much for decisions that determine exaltation, other types of decisions such as the color of your house, not so much.  We should scrutinize what we are asking and even ask if we should simply move forward.  I have found that moving forward tends to move the Lord to action.  And you won’t get too far down a road that does not lead to him.

Don’t get me wrong, the Lord can remind you to take your extra house key in the morning without you knowing that later in the day you would lose your other key.  But he can also let us choose between two very different majors in college.  Silence does not always mean silence in the sense of the Lord doesn’t want to answer.  It means sometimes we just need to move forward.  We also need to learn to make wise decisions.  If we consistently kept training wheels on our bicycle, we will never explore the full potential of the bike.  We will always be at the mercy of the training wheels.  The Lord needs to remove the training wheels and allow us space to learn.  We cannot learn if he is consistently urging us onto action.  He must pull back his hand on our back pushing us forward and allow for our own will and desire to motivate us to action.

One of the most important elements the silence teaches is that it prepares our mind to hear deeper doctrines and feel more powerful lessons.  The deeper the feelings and the more poignant the experience the greater the sticking power in our lives.  When that moment comes when the heavens break open, we receive that light with greater desire, greater passion and greater faith.  It lodges in our heart and mind with greater ability to make necessary changes.  While in our silent moments we become far more humble, willing to submit to trial, willing to change our nature and behavior.  We become really willing to do anything the Lord asks. 

Let’s not assume however that silence means that the Lord is silent.  What I have found is that he is often silent on certain questions, concerns and matters he feels we need some time to consider.  However, revelation on other subjects does not cease to flow.  I have had regular answers to my questions while waiting patiently for an answer to problems and difficulties I am facing.  This means that we are often seeking revelation on various subjects and questions and that a pause in revelation on one question does not hinder any other questions being asked.

There will come a time however when the Lord will fall silent on all subjects.  This is our Liberty Jail moment.  This is where we learn the other type of faith.  Faith without the miracle.  The Lord must know what we will do when he withdraws his spirit from our lives.  He must fully know who we are as saints and what we will do on our own free will.  Many struggle with this moment in time, or even moments in time.  They do not struggle with the idea of maintaining faith through a trial, or even the loss of the revelation.  So often we miss the simply emotional companionship of the Holy Ghost in our lives.  We can become so accustomed to having his presence that it becomes a part of us and we hardly recognize it as something different than our own emotions.  We can become so aligned with the spirit that when it speaks we listen as if it were an old friend giving sacred advice.  What we struggle with when the spirit stands still is defining who we are without the spirit.  What are the true motivational sources in our lives.  What truly drives us, makes us happy, fills us with joy.  When the spirit stands still we find out more about ourselves in just a matter of a few days that years with the spirit.  We must come to know who we are and what motivates us in our lives.  Silence in the heavens is one way that the Lord accomplishes it.

So when we feel as though the Lord is silent in our lives, we should recognize that he has purpose and design in it.  He does not hold back his revelation as some type of April fools joke.  When he does so, he does it with specific purposes in mind.  I hope that you can see just how valuable these moments can be for us in our lives.  I hope that today you meet with the Savior and speak with him and the Father through the Spirit.  Most of all I hope that you know he lives.  Until next week, do your part so that he can do his.