When the Silence Isn't What We Think

Last week I texted my dad and stepmom to ask about a summer visit. Days passed. No response. And in that silence, my mind filled in the blanks. Maybe they're trying to find a kind way to tell us not to come. Maybe it's not a good time. Maybe...

When life slowed down, and I finally called, the truth was the complete opposite of my fears. They'd never received the text. My stepmom was overjoyed—she even talked about seeing God's hand in the timing—and within minutes she was planning a day just for the two of us. The whole time I was bracing for rejection, the answer was already acceptance and a happy yes. I was just lost in my own understanding of things.

On a recent phone call, my dad and I talked about the day he dropped me off at college. For 38 years, I've carried a specific memory: my mom and I unpacking my dorm room while my dad offered his help to other families in the dorm. I kept glancing around, wondering where he'd gone. "Why isn’t he with me in this room? It's probably because it's hard for him to be with me," were just some of my thoughts. I remember the feeling when they drove away—there was freedom, but also a deep sadness and aloneness. I wondered if they couldn't wait to leave.

But that's not all of the story. Dad told me he'd brought his toolbox on purpose. While I was looking for him, he was down the hall, knocking on doors, asking other freshmen and their families if anything needed hanging or fixing—anything to delay the goodbye a little longer. He wasn't avoiding me. He was near me, just outside my line of sight, doing the only thing he knew how to do with a heart that didn't want to let go.

For 38 years, I had the facts of that day and the story wrong.

I recently heard someone say that after we come to Christ, we spend the rest of our lives undoing wrong thoughts about God. That line has stayed with me, because if I can misread my earthly father—a man who has provided for me and been kind to me my whole life —how much more do I misread my Father in heaven?

Think about the seasons when God feels silent. We've prayed. We've waited. The answer doesn't come, or it comes as no, or life doesn't happen the way we hoped. And in that gap—in that waiting—we start writing a story. Maybe He's distant. Maybe He's disappointed in me. Maybe this means He doesn't care, or He's forgotten, or the answer is no because I’m not worth a yes.

But what if, like my dad with his toolbox, God is not absent in the silence—He's near, working on our behalf, in ways we simply can't see from where we're standing? What if the very thing we've interpreted as rejection is actually love, already at work, just not yet visible?

Isaiah 55 tells us His thoughts are not our thoughts, His ways not our ways—not because He's distant, but because He sees the whole hallway while I am only seeing my own doorway. Lamentations tells us His mercies are new every morning, even when the night feels long. And Job, after everything, doesn't say I finally got my answers. He says, I had heard of you, but now I see you. Job's ability to find peace came from finally seeing God as He actually is, rather than the story Job had built about Him.

I wonder how many of us are living inside a 38-year-old misunderstanding of God—shaped by a hard season, an unanswered prayer, a silence we filled with our own worst guess. And I wonder what it would feel like to hear, finally, His side of the story. To discover that in the very moment we felt most alone, He was nearer than we knew, already moving toward the yes we couldn't yet see.