When God is Quiet and the World is Loud
Photo by Kevin Carter R.I.P
These aren’t just questions for people who hate God. They’re the questions you ask when you’re trying to love Him, and it hurts. They’re the things you whisper in your car, or scream into your pillow. They don’t come from a place of hate. They come from a place of real, deep disappointment. The kind that sits in your stomach like a stone.
Why did you stay hidden?
Why write a book so confusing,and then get mad when we’re confused? If you knew most people would end up in hell, why make them? Why make hell at all? Why are the rules about slaves in the Bible, but not a clear “NO” to slavery itself? How is it fair to punish someone forever for a life that only lasted eighty years? When my some of my kids were very little, I didn’t leave a sharp needle on the dinning table and say “Don’t touch.” Why didn’t you do that for us? We’ve all heard the slick answers. The logic tricks. The “mysterious ways” speech. But it doesn’t work anymore. Not when we open our eyes. The question isn’t just in our heads now. It’s on the news. It has an address.
Why did you stay silent?
We see your silence in Gaza. It’s in the eyes of a kid who just lost his whole family under the bombs. Your silence is in Sudan, where people are being wiped out and the world just changes the channel. It was in the air for those nine minutes on a street in Minneapolis, while a man called for his mother and couldn’t breathe. Where were you?
Why treat people like background characters?
Ask the people of Mariupol, buried in their own city. Ask the families in parts of Africa where war is so old it doesn’t even make the news. The story of Job isn’t a fable. It feels like the manual. People used as props in a story we never agreed to be in.
And what does your church do? Too often, we don’t look like an answer. We look like more of the problem. We take sides like it’s a sports game. We bless bombs for our team. We use big, holy words to make the suffering of “the other side” sound okay. We care more about being right than being kind. We have become the chaplains for the chaos, not the healers of it. It makes a person want to give up. To think that maybe the doubters are right, and the whole thing is just a sad, beautiful lie. But… what if we have had the job description wrong this whole time? What if our main job isn’t to explain God, but to show what He might be like? What if our real answer to all this screaming isn’t a better argument, but a better way of living?
There’s an old word for it: Shalom. It doesn’t just mean “quiet.” It means things-are-as-they-should-be. It’s the active, sweaty, gritty work of making things whole.
To “Why are you silent?” Shalom says: Then I will be loud. I will not shut up about the bombs, or the genocide, or the injustice in my own town.
To “Why didn’t you condemn slavery?” Shalom says: Then I will condemn every chain I see; the chains of racism, of poverty, of systems that crush people. I will fight them.
To the God who seems to use people as pawns, Shalom says: Then I will see every single person as the main character of their own sacred story. I will honor their pain. I will remember their name.
To the Christian who tells me I am going to hell, Shalom looks them in the eye and says, quietly: Then I will love you anyway. There is a place for you at my table, too.
This isn’t letting God off the hook. This is putting ourselves on the hook. It’s saying, “I don’t have the answers for why You seem so quiet. But I will not be quiet. I don’t know why You allow such horror. But I will spend my life fighting it. If you are love, then let this little piece of the world, right here where I am, look a little more like love.”
Maybe real faith isn’t believing God has a good plan when children are dying. Maybe it’s deciding to be a good plan when God’s plan is impossible to see. We may never get answers. The stone in our stomach might never fully go away. But Shalom offers us a path forward. It says: Build anyway. Heal anyway. Stand in the gap anyway. Not because all is well, but because it is not. And someone has to start making it right.
One day, if I stand in front of God, I will still have all my questions. They will be at the front of my tongue. But maybe, just maybe, He will look at my hands, not for how clean they are, but for what they have been doing. Were they building, or were they breaking? Were they healing, or were they hiding?
Let our lives be our loudest argument. Let our stubborn, everyday acts of making peace be the only answer we have to give.
Read more about the Author here: Philip Kakungulu
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