By Heidi Johnston
This liturgy is taken from Every Moment Holy Volume 3 from Rabbit Room Press. You can find more liturgies like these at EveryMomentHoly.com.
Jehovah Shalom, God of our peace,
You promised that your burden
would be light.
Yet here I am, shoulders bent
under the weight
of a silence that is long and heavy.
I call to you, and wait, and hear no answer.
I cry to you, but do not hear your voice.
I am as one overtaken on a mountain path
by thick mist and fog. I cannot see my way.
Untethered, I feel the loss, not of you alone,
but also of myself and who I am in you.
I recall with longing days when
the waters parted at your command
and you carried me, fatherlike,
into your presence;
when your lovingkindness was
the whisper that revived my weary soul;
when your presence was the pillar
that marked my path by day,
and your voice the flame
that banished darkness
and kindled my song in the night.
Oh God, my God,
where is your comfort now?
Why has your voice stilled?
A MOMENT OF PRAYERFUL SILENCE IS KEPT.
Have I wavered or wandered from your
path? Has my heart been drawn away?
Search me, O God, and find within me any
pride that causes me to stand at a distance
even as I mourn your absence,
any sin that brings dishonor
to your name, grieving your Spirit
and robbing me of the intimacy I so
crave, or so long to crave.
If my gaze has drifted,
help me trust your grace,
and look you in the eye once more.
Or, if this distance is instead
a hidden blessing—then let me
be found faithful. If in this season
of loneliness your silence simply
offers me a chance to do what
will never be asked of me again
in all of eternity to come;
to trust without sight,
believing that time will vindicate my
hope and prove you ever constant,
then give me the courage to stand,
trusting that these lines I throw
out are not cast into emptiness
but, passing through the veil,
have taken hold of things eternal.
Give me boldness now,
even as doubt crouches at my door,
that I may choose to anchor my
heart not in the ebb and flow of
feelings
but in what I know to be true.
That your word can be trusted.
That your promises, unbroken
in all of history, remain constant
for me. That you are still who you
have shown yourself to be:
unchanging in holiness,
extravagant in grace,
relentless in love.
If you are both the beginning and the
end, the first and the last,
then what was true
when light first illuminated the horizon
remains true even in my
disenchantment.
If you are outside of time,
seeing all of history in a single glance,
then this moment of doubt is simply
that: one point in an eternal story
which at its consummation
will prove you were always steadfast.
Could it be that even now, within this
darkness, you are shaping and preparing me,
deepening my trust and forming
within me a richness of love
or a truer humility
which will one day be used in your
kingdom or for your glory, in ways
I cannot yet understand?
If so, then fix my eyes on what
for now is hidden from my view.
Hold my soul fast,
O God of my salvation,
that I may praise you even here
within the silence.
For you are my Rock and my
Redeemer, my Stronghold,
and the Sustainer of my Faith.
Amen.
Heidi Johnston is the author of Choosing Love in a Broken World and Life in the Big Story. She lives in Newtownards, Northern Ireland, with her husband, Glenn, and their two teenage daughters, Ellie and Lara.
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