If you walk with Christ long enough, you’ll eventually hit a season where heaven seems achingly quiet. You open the Scriptures, and they feel flat. You pray, and it feels like your words barely clear the ceiling. You look for guidance, for comfort, for something, and all you find is stillness.

I know that terrain well.

When my wife died, a great silence seemed to swallow the world. People spoke words of comfort, and I was grateful for every one of them, but the silence underneath it all was deafening. I would sit with my Bible open on my lap, whispering prayers through tears, and nothing seemed to come back. No warm feeling. No sense of nearness. No dramatic intervention. Just that still, heavy quiet.

And in that quiet, a truth surfaced that I wish we talked about more openly: God’s silence is not God’s absence.

The psalmist understood this ache. “O LORD, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way?” (Psalm 13:1, NLT). That’s not a man with a tidy devotional life. That’s a man who feels abandoned. And yet, by the end of that same psalm, he says, “But I trust in your unfailing love.”

Trust in a silent season is not naïve. It’s faith doing its deepest work.

So what do we do when God feels silent? Let me offer a few steps — not theories, but footholds I clung to when the ground beneath me shifted.

 

1. Keep showing up, especially when you don’t feel like it.

In the months after losing my wife, I didn’t feel like reading the Bible. I didn’t feel like praying. Grief has a way of hollowing you out. But I learned something I haven’t forgotten: obedience often precedes emotion.

Isaiah says, “Those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength” (Isaiah 40:31, ESV). Waiting isn’t passive. It’s showing up again and again with an open heart, even when you’re running on fumes.

Every morning, I opened the Word anyway. A close friend encouraged me to read the Psalms, and sometimes I only made it a verse or two. But it was enough. I chose to anchor myself in something unchanging when everything else in my life had shifted.

 

2. Hold on to what you know, not what you feel.

Feelings are real, but they are not reliable guides. Grief taught me that.

There’s an Irish insight that helped me frame my own emotions. In Gaelic, there’s no way to say “I am sad.” Instead they say “Tá brón orm” meaning, “There is a sadness upon me.” It’s not your identity. It’s not who you are. It’s something resting on you for a time, and something that will lift.

In the silence, I kept going back to the bedrock. God is good. God is near. God is faithful. God is working, even when I can’t see it. These truths didn’t rise from my emotions, they rose from Scripture and from years of walking with Jesus. When everything in me felt lost, the Word reminded me of what was still true.

Hebrews 13:5 became a lifeline: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” It doesn’t say you will always feel His presence, it says He is there.

 

3. Let other Christians carry you when you can’t carry yourself.

After my wife passed, people reached out. Not always with the perfect words, but with presence. Some prayed when I couldn’t. Some sat in silence with me. Some made sure I ate. Others simply checked in, and that mattered more than they knew.

The early church “devoted themselves to fellowship” (Acts 2:42). That goes beyond Sunday pleasantries. They needed each other and we do too. Faith is personal, yes, but never private.

If you’re in a silent season, don’t isolate. Let others hold you.

 

4. Trust that God is working beneath the silence.

Looking back now, I can see what I couldn’t see then. God was stitching things together in the dark. He was strengthening my faith, deepening my compassion, quieting my soul, and preparing me for a path I wasn’t yet ready to walk.

Silence is not the same as inactivity. A seed grows in the soil long before you see any sign of it, and God often does His most transformative work in exactly those seasons when everything feels still.

 

5. Be honest with God.

He isn’t impressed by polished prayers. He wants the truth.

Some of my most honest prayers in that season sounded something like: “Lord, I’m hurting. I don’t understand. But I’m not letting go of You.”  True faith is raw, real, and held by grace.

 

When the silence lifts

Eventually, it does lift. Not always suddenly, not always dramatically, but steadily. One day, the Word feels alive again. Prayer finally feels like connection. Hope stirs again. And when it does, you realise God was holding you the whole time.

If you’re in a silent season today, take heart. The Lord has not stepped away, He is closer than your breath, working in ways you cannot yet see. Keep showing up. Keep anchoring yourself in His promises. Keep trusting His heart, even when you can’t feel it.

Silence is a season, not the end of the story. And the God who walked with me through mine will walk with you through yours.