I was thinking about nothing this morning while making my bed and Jesus just dropped a thought into my mind. He experienced a change in communication with His Father while He was here on earth. Jesus, The Father and of course The Holy Spirit existed together perfectly for all of eternity past until Jesus was born here on earth. The way they communicated in Heaven is only something we can try and fail to imagine. To coexist together without limitation, to never wonder what the other one thought because you are all omniscient, all one, all holy. To completely know and be known. God doesn’t wonder, He knows. That was the life, the existence, Jesus had before He came to save all of mankind. Then He was born. Certainly, a baby cannot communicate the way an adult does, and never like God can. Did the fact that Jesus was 100% human while still being 100% God cause His communication with His Father to be different? How could it not?

10 years ago, my family started to go through what would be a difficult decade. All of us humans can wake up any day and face unexpected tragedies, I never in my life thought we would all have gone through so very much. Ever. I didn’t think we deserved a free pass from trials but when the hits kept coming, God seemed to go silent. When people say they went through something awful and God drew near to them, I’m glad for them but I didn’t experience it that way, at all. The Lord who was so close to me, speaking to my heart, teaching and guiding me every single day seemed to have broken up with me. That is the only thing I can relate it to. One day we were solid and the next He seemed to change His mind. I didn’t see it coming. It was devastating. My prayers went from joyful praying, secrets kept between us, His divine guidance and humor, to nothing. I felt like I was praying to a brick wall. No whispers, not an utterance. I cried out to the Lord countless times, what have I done? Where are you? Why don’t you want to speak to me, but I was met with silence. The dryness, the darkness of those times are something I cannot express in words. I just can’t. Had the Lord forsaken me? I felt like king Saul. Chosen one day and tormented the next.

I don’t know how long it took for God to show me that while He was no longer communicating with me in a more direct sense, He was still there. Still listening, still working. I didn’t want that. I wanted it the way it was. When He speaks to your heart so strongly, and so often, you know it’s Him. Him changing things up at the worst times of my life was unkind in my opinion. How gracious and good is our God to not care what our opinions are. He is holy and will always do what is best for us, even if we do not understand. Praise you Lord. His stepping back (but never leaving) showed me how very tiny my faith was. If He wasn’t there holding my hand every second of every day, I was like a lost child in a supermarket. Prone to panic and tears. I questioned Him so much all through this time. What was the point of being quiet? How did that help me at all? If He was only and always good, how could breaking my heart with what felt like His absence be good in any way? I cried, I pleaded and I railed against Him. I expect to be hurt from the world, but not Him. Never, Him. After fighting and struggling, anger and a trash can burning, dumpster fire of discovering what a massive amount of false pride I have, I finally understood He was trying to grow my faith. It’s not hard for a child to feel safe when they have their parent in their sightline but what about when they step around the corner. Just because the child can’t see them makes them no less there. It’s not about the child’s perception of where the parent is at, it’s a fact that they are still there, sight unseen. I needed to learn that He has made a promise to never leave or forsake me, it was up to Him to keep it. It is up to me to believe it.

Hebrews 11:⁶ And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

If He is real then He is right. If He is right then everything He does in our lives, everything He allows, is right too. Not only right, but good in the sense that it is always for our good. Man, that’s a hard one.

And just when you think He cannot possibly understand what it’s like for you as a human, we remember Jesus. Our precious Savior. King of kings, Lord of lords, born on this earth, fully human and unable to speak. One day existing in the fullness of time and power and the next limited by the fragile humanity that He himself created. As a newborn was He able to pray? The Word became flesh. The most vulnerable of all, a newborn baby. Though in His infancy He may not have known or understood, His Father was there. When He went to desolate places to pray, wasn’t that entirely different then Heaven? There is no desolation in Heaven. And when He was in Heaven with His Father, did He pray then? Wasn’t it more like talking or communing? Did He need words in heaven or was it more like a constant, spiritual state of being? I would certainly never venture to guess, I’m just trying to point out that from Heaven to earth, communication with God the Father certainly changed for Jesus. I just wonder how much. Jesus did not have false pride and He surely did not need to grow His faith so why did He have to go through that?

The only answer that makes any sense is, US! When He was hanging on the cross and asking His Father “Why have you forsaken me” (Matthew 27:46) He wasn’t just quoting David. He felt forsaken. Our sins, laid upon Him, occluding His Father’s presence. Deafening His voice. But, Praise be to our omnipresent God and Father, He was still there. He is everywhere at all times, always. He did not leave His son and He will not leave us. And the tragic beauty of it all remains, Jesus understands what it feels like to experience a lessening. A lessening of God’s presence in our most dire of circumstances. Jesus who by the word of His power upholds all things (Hebrews 1:3) cried out to God, “Why have you forsaken me?”

Forsaken in Greek Strong’s (G1459) means to abandon, leave behind, left in dire circumstances. That is a life changing alteration of communication. What an incredible love He has for us. He wasn’t just born to die and save us from our sins. He was born to be like us, to completely know us, not just as His created beings but as a created being in and literally of Himself. To inhabit the pain of the created. The limitations, frustrations and anguish. We can honestly say that Jesus bore all of that and infinitely more in His life here on earth. He too wondered if He was left behind, abandoned, forsaken. He wasn’t and neither are we. The Lord may have stepped out of your sightline, but never your life. What is He trying to pull out of you today? He is the Creator, that’s what He does. A painter doesn’t leave a painting half done, a builder doesn’t build a house with no roof, a gardener doesn’t till the soil but plant no seeds. The Lord is doing something beautiful in you. He will never be satisfied with halfway. The further down the road that you walk with Him, the less He seems to give words and affirmations and the more He wants us to rely on our faith. The communication may change but so will we. The longer the stretches, the more we know how fragile our faith can be. The stretches, the dry times are meant to expose our lack of faith and strengthen where we are weak. Christine Caine has a brilliant quote “Will you trust Him when you can’t trace Him?” That is hard and beautiful and painful. In a world so dependent on Wi-Fi it’s hard not to feel like our prayers are getting dropped like our cell phone service. Can you hear me now? The beauty and the lesson are, He can. He can hear you, even when you can’t hear Him. He can see you even when you can’t see Him and that is the garden that faith grows in! The communication may change but the God of all creation doesn’t, but He is hoping we will! His goal in our lives is not always communication to prove that He is there, but for us to trust that He is there when there seems to be zero communication. The communication of Christ on the cross went from “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” to “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit” (Luke 23:46). The communication of Christ to us, in us, will always take us from fear to trust. Forsaken to forgiven, silent to sacred. Don’t stop praying, don’t stop knowing you are so fully heard and known. Keep committing yourself into your Father’s hands, that is the communication of Christ.