NOISES IN SILENCES

There is a time that I need an answer, a response, feedback of any form, and I need it yesterday, and I am literally uneasy. Most of those times, I’m greeted with deafening silence and the silence tends to linger on. I must try and hold up myself from screaming, ‘Come on GOD!! don’t you care that I’m sinking or come on God!!, wake up you sleeper.

The trouble with that attitude, is that it makes me fill in the gaps created by the silence. The filling in of the gaps leads to second guessing and often the second guess is a human error, a loitering of the mind that imagines the worst.

Think about a time when someone did not answer your call and you perhaps needed to talk about a matter urgently, what was your reaction? What did you think? My guess is that you were upset, and your mind began to fill in the gaps, ‘she is ignoring me’, ‘she is busy with her other friends’, ‘She is careless.’ ‘She got an accident’ etc. When you finally meet, you are so upset and not wanting to listen, then you notice, she is holding something, it dawns on you that she was busy trying to determine the best birthday gift to buy for you?

When the prophet Samuel in the bible, delayed coming to the scene and the clock ticked on or the sun began to set, Saul felt a gap, a gap caused by a delay, an unexplained delay and an overwhelming silence. The sound of the silence could have been deafening, triggering noises. The noises that erupt out of silence are in the form of thoughts, panic, and a need to act.

Saul commenced with his filling in of the gap, let me take my guess, Saul must have said in his mind, “This Samuel is not coming at all’, or “God will understand, or let me do this myself”, or ‘I’m a Leader, why get restricted’. The way it looks to me, this second guessing, this filling in the gaps, this noise in silence usually falls in two key aspects.

1) Giving up on a promise

2) Taking Matters in our hands

Delayed promises are like elasticity, it gets stretched, sometimes to its limits. The elasticity being stretched is hope, a hope that the promise will come sooner than later. As time elapses, there is a dwindling, fatigue, a pain, and the overstretched hope has another name, ‘hopelessness’. The prophet Habakuk anticipates delay in fulfilment of promises, and he calls it lingering. He says even if it lingers wait for it, don’t give up it will surely come to pass. Keep your hope alive, it is the connector, the conduit to your promise. Protect your hope, remember the one who promised is faithful, ‘hope against hope’, this is an Abrahamic faith (Romans 4:18), it’s an Ezekiel confession, speaking into dry bones to become an army, it’s an Elijah declaration, that rain is coming after three and a half years of drought. Hey, do not ‘fill in the gaps. Keep hope alive, fix your eyes to the promise.

Prolonged silences are like an itching, you want to scratch where it itches. Itching is best described by some of us who used to take an anti-malaria called chloroquine. Chloroquine was so itchy and tended to each in areas of the body that you would rather not scratch. When promises are delayed, the silence is too much, you want to hear something, you can’t just watch or wait passively. The trouble is, sometimes the medical instruction is not to scratch yourself, yet the reflex is to scratch.

The thing is, when we take matters in our hands, we are making a silent declaration that God is not helpful. Do not get me wrong, we must stay proactive not reactive, proactive in the sense that we do the standard things that are necessary. For instance, get a good diagnosis if unhealthy, write several applications if you are looking for a job and make the necessary business engagements that will lead you to start that business. Back to Abraham the grandfather of faith, when there was a delay in getting his expectation, the promised son was not coming, and upon the advice of his wife, it itched so bad that they took the matters in their hands, they took a ‘short cut’, they fixed it, and got another woman, younger enough to give Abraham a son. Did it work, yes it worked, for a short time, the consequences were tough and hard.

Beware of fixing it your way, keep the faith in God, hold your breath, or breath in and out, whatever helps, but desist from acting for God, which in effect is discharging God of what he would have done in his time. One guy in the bible told Jesus, I know you can heal me, but will you heal me (Mtthew 8:2), 'Lord if you are willing, you can make me clean'. God can and will, whereas the 'can' is certain, the 'will' is usually doubted, sometimes because his timing and our timing are mismatched. That's exactly the placeholder for faith, faith fits well in the jigsaw puzzle of silence in the waiting room of God. Faith shuts out noise, this is exactly what the Faith in Elisha did, it sound proofed the noise coming from people, he told the prophets that were turning on his panic button, 'Yes, I know,' he replied, 'so be quiet.'

I do not think, I should say much, rest it becomes noise, let me stop here and allow you to fill in the gaps. Please note that silence is loud, sometimes louder than noise. Be warned though, when the silence is coming from God, check your promise, hold back from taking matters into your hands. Since our minds are live wires, we cannot stop them from filling into the gaps, or giving feedback noise, the best way though is to steer them with God’s promise and renew them daily, that way we will know the will of God. Keep Hope and Faith, the two twins, will deal with the temptations to give up on God's promise and the itching to take matters in our own hands.