"I'm starting with the man in the mirror, I'm asking him to change his ways. And no message could have been any clearer" ~ Michael Jackson.
I have felt prolonged silences of God and deep deprivations of the soul.
The atheist adds more pain by saying, “he is silent because he is not there”.
Silence is a divine mirror of perspective that we will all face. It is when God asks, “who are you?”
It agitates what we suppress beneath a veneer of adequacy, anaesthetize, deny or don’t even know until we have to face it.
Like a desert it offers no real place to hide, but relentlessly unmasks the wretched man in us all.
In one life-class crisis, my denial was so intensified by shock that I could not see what others saw, such is the power of the mind.
Then the pain bit and rage followed as I started to adjust to reality: a healthy next step. Then came brokenness and acceptance.
Those responses are ugly, but it is like expressing a boil. The worst of us must be revealed so God can lance what hinders us.
Is it pleasant? No. Does it bring out our best? Hardly. Does it provoke to despair? Absolutely. Is it necessary? Sadly yes.
Abraham spent years trying to outlive his past until, at the end of his tether, with his knife poised over his son, he looked in the mirror.
God broke the silence, stopped it all, removed his past, his regrets and the blackmailers of his soul so he could reach his potential.
It will come for you too. Hold on. As said in the Best Marigold Hotel, "It always comes right in the end, so if it hasn't, its not yet the end".
(c) Peter Missing: bethelstone@gmail.com
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