My life has been a habitual journey of looking for God in everything.
Listening for his loud exclamations of adoration towards me and searching for gifts of obvious truth for my life in his Word, creation, in small and large miracles, have been the highlights of my life. His acts of revelation are how he romances us drawing us closer to himself and to remind us he is still here. The footprints of his love are everywhere to be found if we only keep our eyes and ears open, anticipating his next act of love.
When our son died, this habit was the tool that gave me strength to survive. God frequently revealed his love to me in special ways from the hummingbird, never seen before, at the cemetery which hovered over Taylor’s casket, looked at us all then flew over us, to dreams that comforted my heart, gave me hope and spoke to me clearly what God wanted to change in my heart. I began to expect constant clear signs of love from him, especially this summer as I had planned to finish my book about my life journey and God’s hand in our grief.
However, this past June started another season of God’s silence. Voicing my concern about this, my boss, Shelly, reminded me that God often says the most in his sweet whispers. I was asking for fireworks and needed to patiently wait for sweet candlelight. This started a deep season of listening and I did hear his whisper as he directed my plans for finishing a book, instead, towards grieving the loss of my mom and stepdad, spending time with friends and family plus harvesting an abundance of fruit in our back yard, which in itself is a text book of God’s wisdom! School started the week after we returned from my mom’s memorial. Back to a more rigorous teaching schedule, I’ve struggled with God’s apparent continued silence.
Guilt began to set in because I was REALLY getting tired of his silence at the same time wondering if I was doing something wrong as I felt so dry in my walk. It was hard dealing with remorse for wanting more from the Creator of the Universe. While I forced myself to read my Bible each day, it was difficult to trust not knowing if God was going to say anything that would give me a spark of inspiration.
Reading the Psalms encouraged and reminded me that David too cried out to God, his Rock, to not be silent.
Psalm 28:1 (NIV)
To you, Lord, I call;
you are my Rock,
do not turn a deaf ear to me.
For if you remain silent,
I will be like those who go down to the pit.
Psalm 83:1 (ESV)
O God, do not keep silence;
do not hold your peace or be still, O God!
Here was the man after God’s heart telling him to not be still! It made me laugh but at the same time gave me boldness to humbly continue to ask God to help me hear his words of love and guidance. In his sweet faithful patience, he did again, quietly.
My Lord gently surprised me one day around our wedding anniversary. After Taylor’s death, as I’ve said before, Gary and I began our journey of grief pretty much separately. He was unable to show his love well to me while drowning in grief. I was unable to show my love adequately to him as his weight of grief was too heavy for me to carry. Yet there was one constant thing we both knew for sure, we loved each other. Many times the best we could do was to sit on our porch swing and silently look at the stars or watch a movie together.
It’s been an up and down journey the last few years, but over the last few months, the Lord whispered to me to spend more time with Gary, rather than in writing. He quietly encouraged to me to trust Gary’s love and more purposefully show my love to him with his love languages, quality time and physical touch. I began to, once again, look for ways to spend time with him. If he asked me to go on an errand with him, even if it wasn’t convenient, I went. God reminded me to stop and rub Gary’s tense shoulders, even if I was feeling weak that day. Purposefully making him meals that he loved, even if they weren’t on my health-kick diet, became a habit again. I wrote him a letter and made a video of our lives that affirmed his love and his pain which touched his heart deeper than I expected. That special peace in our marriage again began to grow.
On our 33rd Anniversary in September, Gary started to respond like the man I married and there was a spark of life in him as we celebrated the best anniversary since Taylor had gone to Heaven. He romanced me in the ways he knew I loved, a sweet card with words of encouragement, suggestions to go out to dinner and planning our next getaway. That comfortable long-life love began to show itself in our relationship even though it had been dormant off and on for three years. It wasn’t fireworks, but definitely sparklers coming alive again in our marriage.
As I meditated on this last week and looked into Gary’s eyes, I felt tears of awe as I realized he was unintentionally reminding me, through our love, that God does not always romance us with wine and roses every day either, yet his comforting love is always present and faithful.
Zephaniah 3: 17 is a verse that has fascinated me the last few years as I get energized hearing the words,
“he will rejoice over you with gladness” and
“he will exult over you with loud singing.”
It’s amazing how I missed the phrase between these two,
“he will quiet you by his love”.
God quietly revealed to me, through my husband, that he is not a boring lover. He wants to share times of silence with us just looking at the stars, gentle times of reminding us in whispers of his love in our quiet times, as well as delighting over us with shouts of his adoration and revelations of plans for our lives.
If the Divine Romance was always fireworks and loud surprises, we would miss the quiet and silent moments that fuel us with peace and deep confidence that our Lord’s love is solid whether he is shouting, speaking softly over us or loving us in silence.
CARLA BARKLEY WOOD 