When God Goes Silent
The hidden gift of seasons we never asked for
“We must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God’s kingdom and blessing.” — Dallas Willard
Most people read this as a comfort. But if you sit with it long enough, you realize Willard is naming a kind of spiritual defiance. A holy resilience. A refusal to believe that God is absent simply because life feels frozen. He is saying that even the season you would never choose is the place where heaven intends to form you. This is not resignation. It is warfare. The quiet kind.
Winter in the Soul
There are seasons in life that feel like winter in the soul.
The kind of winter you do not choose, but the kind that chooses you.
Everything familiar goes quiet.
The ground freezes.
Nothing moves.
You pray, but the heavens sound muffled.
You wait, but the waiting feels hollow.
You wonder if God has stepped away for a moment longer than you can bear.
And then one day, without warning, the life you built begins to come apart.
One morning, my life looked one way.
By nightfall, I was standing in the ruins of a story I could no longer name.
A future I believed God was shaping for me dissolved in real time.
Conversations once full of possibility collapsed into confusion.
Paths that felt ordained were quietly rerouted.
And as the dust settled, something painful became clear: There would be a story the other side would tell, and there was a story I carried in my own heart.
Only one of those stories is allowed to be spoken.
This was the beginning of my winter.
Not a season of weather, but a season of the soul.
The Stillness That Does Not Lift
I tried to stay humble.
I tried to learn what I could.
But nothing about the experience offered an easy lesson.
It felt as if life itself had gone dormant.
And then the ground shifted again.
