Our Silence With God Often Leads To Silence With Others

​"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" ~Jesus

In his dying moments, Jesus was completely vulnerable with God.

I wrote yesterday about my emotional immaturity, and how that often looked like me using the silent treatment against people in my life. But long before I ever used the silent treatment against people, I used it against God.

I grew up believing that if God ever discovered who I really was, there would be hell to pay.

Literally.

I grew up believing that a relationship with God looked like showing up to church, it looked like honoring sacraments, to include the sacrament of confessing every screw up the moment I screwed up.

I used to confess to made up offenses to church leaders that sounded less damaging than my real offenses. I'm not sure if lying to God or lying to my authority figures came first when it came to my attempts to avoid wrath, but they were connected for sure.

Either way, avoiding wrath certainly made me great at lying.

The reality is the silent treatment is a variation of lying. The silent treatment, at its core, is a form of deception—not in the outright, spoken sense, but in the way it manipulates truth by omission. It distorts reality by withholding the full picture of what’s happening inside us.

When we go silent, we send the message that everything is fine—or at least that the other person should figure out what’s wrong without us naming it. It keeps people in the dark about our emotions, preventing them from responding honestly or helpfully.

"My God, my God, why have your forsaken me."

For most of my life, I never knew THAT God. The God who longed to know when I felt forsaken. The God who longed to enter into my struggles and not see in them a pathway to hell.

You know, just before Jesus was being completely vulnerable with God, "my God my God", he formed a relationship with a man being killed on a cross next to him. A thief who opened his heart to Jesus, who opened his heart to the thief in return.

Quite often our emotional availability to God looks like our emotional availability to those next to us.

Quite often, if we have learned it's a good idea to hide our real selves from God, then we come to believe it's a good idea to hide ourselves from those next to us.

And quite often, the God who can be the most powerful voice inside the deepening silence in a relationship ends up being the one who gets the silent treatment the loudest.

If I am honest, I didn't cry out to God in the midst of my silent marriage. Not really. And if I am honest, a big part of me believed that God wanted to use the pain of that brokenness to inflict penance on me for so many sins of my past.

I have also had to consider that I didn't cry out to God for fear he would actually heal all that was broken, and rob me of my chance for self-inflicted penance.

I have come a long way with this idea of God - in my relationship with Him. I am sure there are some days God wishes I would go back to the silent treatment; I have no hesitation these days to cry out, fully exposed, my God my God.

I have destroyed a lot of relationships along the way because I treated the people in my life like I treated God. But it is my hope that by being less inclined these days to use the silent treatment with God, that I will be less inclined to ever use it with anyone else in my life ever again.

That is a big ask, I know.

But it is also an ask I am no longer afraid to make.

And that is growth.

That is the opposite of silence.