| The Hidden Life |
Chapter 7 |
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Nothing is so awful as this silence of God — to feel that communication with him is cut off. It is a pathetic prayer in which a psalm writer pleads: “Be not silent to me, lest I become like them that go down into the pit.” Anything from God is better than that he be silent to us. It would be a sad, dreary, lonely world if the atheist’s creed were true, — that there is no God; that there is no ear to hear our prayer; that no voice of answering help or love or comfort ever comes out of heaven for us.
Are prayers ever unanswered? There are many prayers which are answered, although we do not know it, and still think them unanswered. The answer is not recognized when it comes. This is true of our common mercies and favors. We pray every morning, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and then we never think of our three meals each day as being answers to prayer. We ask God for health, for raiment, for the things we need, for prosperity in business, for friends; all these things come to us in continuity, without break. But do we remember that we prayed for them, and that they come from God as answers to our requests?
The same is true of many of the spiritual blessings which we seek. We ask for holiness. It does not seem to us that we are advancing in holiness; but all the while our life is imperceptibly and unconsciously receiving more of the mind and spirit of Christ, and we are being changed into his image. We expect the answer in a marked way, while it comes silently, as the dew comes upon the drooping flowers and withering leaves. But, like the flowers and the leaves, our soul is refreshed and our life is renewed.
We put our cares into God’s hands in prayer, and they do not seem to become less. We think there has been no answer to our supplications. But all the while an unseen hand has been quietly shaping, adjusting, and disentangling for us the complex affairs of our life which made us anxious. We are not conscious of it, but our prayers have been receiving continual answer in peace and blessing.
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