The Silence of God

I heard this song for the first time a few years ago (and even bought the CD specifically for this song), but I had forgotten about it until a friend posted some lyrics from it on Facebook recently. I pulled it out and listened to it yesterday and could barely read the lyrics on the liner notes through my tears.

For the last several months, God has been taking me through a season of brokenness. He has been stripping away a lot of the things that I had built the foundation of my life on. I know that this has been a necessary process, but it has been very painful, and so many times I find myself crying out to the Lord and, according to my very limited view of God, receiving no answer in return. I love the last verse of the song that talks about how Jesus also had to experience God's silence, and I am reminded once again that I have a Savior that is well-acquainted with my grief. I also love the refrain at the end that reminds me even though there will be residual aching from the refining that God is doing in my life, the breaking will not last forever and there is hope on the other side.



It's enough to drive a man crazy; it'll break a man's faith
It's enough to make him wonder if he's ever been sane
When he's bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod
And the heaven's only answer is the silence of God

It'll shake a man's timbers when he loses his heart
When he has to remember what broke him apart
This yoke may be easy, but this burden is not
When the crying fields are frozen by the silence of God

And if a man has got to listen to the voices of the mob
Who are reeling in the throes of all the happiness they've got
When they tell you all their troubles have been nailed up to that cross
Then what about the times when even followers get lost?
'Cause we all get lost sometimes...

There's a statue of Jesus on a monastery knoll
In the hills of Kentucky, all quiet and cold
And He's kneeling in the garden, as silent as a Stone
All His friends are sleeping and He's weeping all alone

And the man of all sorrows, he never forgot
What sorrow is carried by the hearts that he bought
So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not
In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God