Spoken To in the Quiet Place

He notices it at the roundabout by the retail park, which is about eleven minutes in.

The radio is off. It has been off since he pulled out of his road, and it was off yesterday, and it was off the day before, and if he is honest with himself, which he mostly is not at this hour, it has been off for most of a year.

There was a playlist. He built it himself, over about four years, and there was a stretch where he would come off the dual carriageway with his eyes stinging and have to sit in the car park for a minute before he could go in and be a person at work. He is not embarrassed about that. He would take it back tomorrow.

What happened is not dramatic and there is no story in it. One morning he put a song on, and it went by, and he arrived, and nothing had happened. And then that happened again. And then one morning he heard his own voice singing a line about being undone by the goodness of God, and he heard how flat it came out, and he thought, quite clearly: you are lying.

So he stopped. Not as a decision. He just did not put it on, and then kept not putting it on, and now the car is quiet for forty minutes each way and he has told nobody, because what would he say. He has not stopped believing anything. He prays in the shower. He is in the same chair on a Sunday and he still puts his hand on his son's head at bedtime and asks God to keep him.

But the car is quiet, and the quiet has started to feel like a verdict.

Where God takes a person He wants to speak to

There is a sentence in Hosea I want to put in front of you, and I want you to notice the geography of it before you notice anything else.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.Hosea 2:14

The wilderness. Not the festival. Not the crowded room with the good sound system. The empty stretch, where nothing grows and nothing much happens and there is no atmosphere to help you.

And what does He do there? He speaks comfortably. The old phrase means He speaks to the heart. Tenderly, close in, the way you talk to someone you love when there is no one else about.

You are in a place God has a long history of talking in. That is not me softening your situation to make you feel better; the written word puts the tender speech and the empty ground in the same sentence on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line about an ancient wilderness and lays it down on a stretch of dual carriageway at ten past eight in the morning.

Now hold on to the first verb, because it is the one that changes the whole picture. I will allure her. He is the one moving. He is doing the drawing. Nobody in that sentence is being told to work themselves up first so that God will find them worth speaking to.

Why the silence felt like guilt

Let me name what actually happened in the car, because I think you have misfiled it.

You did not go cold and then stop singing. You stopped singing because you have integrity. You heard your own voice make a claim your chest was not making, and something honest in you refused to keep going. That is not backsliding. That is the same instinct that stops a man signing a document he has not read.

You have been treating your own honesty as a symptom, and it never was one. God has never once asked for a performance, and the word of God is blunt about what He does and does not want brought to Him, and the Holy Spirit does not go quiet because a man declined to fake something.

Here is where it gets worse before it gets better, so stay with me. Somewhere in the last year you did a piece of arithmetic. It went: if I felt it then and I do not feel it now, something has been withdrawn. And you did not say that out loud to anybody, and because you did not say it out loud, nobody could tell you it is false.

So I am telling you. Nothing has been withdrawn. You were never held on the condition that you kept feeling it. That is written into the covenant God made with you and not into the mood you were in when you first heard about it, and His Spirit is the one who has been the deposit on that the whole way through the quiet year.

Dry feeling is not distance. It is not disobedience and it is not a symptom of a thing you did. It is a temperature, and a temperature is not a location.