Silence of God Part 1
On the way home from a parking-garage-top 4th of July party, must have been around 11pm, the family minivan just stopped working*, its nose sort of sticking out into an intersection. A kind young dad walking with his wife and pushing a stroller stopped to help me, and together we shoved the van (after I turned the parking brake off) backwards into a parking spot whose meter wouldn’t turn on till 9am the next morning. My wife and four of the kids climbed into our second car; she would drop them off at the house and come back for me and the baby, who was asleep in his car seat, in a way enviably unaware of the car troubles going on around him. My family drove away, and the baby and I sat quietly in the silence of the dead van’s interior. I sat in the driver’s seat, propping the driver’s door open with my foot to allow a breeze, slight as it was, to relieve some of the heat building in the van and some of the stress building in my chest. The sounds of a city, wrapping up after a big Independence Day event, reflected and reverberated off the nearby apartment complex, pedestrian traffic made its way past me now and then, and a stray firework exploded far enough away that it made only a thud. Otherwise I sat, the baby and I, in silence: the silence of his sleep, the silence of a dead van, the silence of the frustration in my tired heart. And I prayed. Not aloud (I didn’t want to wake the baby), but inside the silence of my own head, allowing the words to form and ascend upward into the sky. And I hoped they would.
Some years ago, back when our family was just starting, back when we lived in Texas, the pastor at the church where I worked asked in a sermon a question whose weight I didn’t, and couldn’t, then appreciate: “Do you sometimes feel like your prayers don’t go anywhere, like they just bounce off the ceiling?” I didn’t know at the time the heartache I’ve experienced since then, and so I didn’t know what it was like to pray from heartache. And because I didn’t know what it was to pray from heartache, I didn’t pray from the deep places of my heart, and so it didn’t matter to me whether my prayers made it past the ceiling.
But there in the quiet of the minivan on that fourth of July evening, it did matter, and I prayed with an honest and risky specificity: I asked for the van to start working, I asked for it to be a simple and inexpensive fix, I asked for God to just fix the van himself right there in that moment. I know he can do those sorts of things and I knew in that moment that he could, and so I asked. And the sounds of the city echoed off the apartment complex, and a passing pedestrian nervously glanced at me through the windshield, and another firework exploded somewhere. And maybe the words of my prayer made it past the van ceiling, and maybe they made it all the way up into the sky. What I got back from that desperate prayer was silence, a silence quieter than the sleeping baby, a silence that was the absence of sound, silence that felt like the absence of God. Twenty minutes later my wife pulled up, and we carried the baby in his car seat from the van to the other car, buckled our seat belts, and drove home. In silence.
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