Cause Your Face to Shine

When God is quiet she assumes He is annoyed, and she has assumed it since she was about nineteen.

Nobody taught her the rule. It assembled itself the way most of our rules do, out of a house where the silences meant something specific. Her father was not a shouter. He was a goer-quiet. And in that kitchen, quiet meant you had done something, and everybody knew it, and the not-being-told was worse than any telling would have been.

So she learned to read a silence, and she got very good at it, and then she got saved at twenty-six and applied the skill to God.

Which means that in forty years of prayer, every unanswered question, every season with nothing in it, every stretch where she did not sense anything at all has been interpreted, automatically and instantly, as displeasure.

She would not put it that way. She would say she has never been very good at hearing from God, which sounds humble and is actually the same thing said sideways.

She is seventy-one. There is a great deal of quiet in her life, most of it ordinary, and she has spent four decades reading a face into it that may never have been there.

A psalm asks for the shining face and never once assumes anger

Psalm 80 has a refrain, and it comes back three times, and it is worth having in front of you.

Turn us again, O God, and cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved (Psalm 80:3, 7 and 19).

Now, that psalm is written in a genuinely bad season. It is not a cheerful psalm. There is weeping in it, and a broken hedge, and a vine that has been trampled.

And in the middle of all that, the request is not: stop being angry with us. It is: cause Your face to shine. The psalmist assumes the shining face is the natural thing, the thing that belongs, the thing to be asked for plainly, and he asks for it three times in one song without ever apologizing for asking.

You are permitted to ask for the shining face without first accounting for the silence. That is what the refrain does three times over, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old refrain into a woman's actual prayer at seventy-one, because Scripture says He helps our weakness when we do not know what to pray.

What a silence is and is not

Let me say the practical thing, because you are a practical woman.

A silence carries no information on its own. None. It is a gap, and a gap has to be filled in by the person experiencing it, and everybody fills it in with whatever they learned to fill it in with.

You learned in a kitchen where quiet meant something. That was accurate reading, in that house, of that man. It was a genuine skill and it probably kept you out of a lot of trouble.

Applied to God it is a misreading, because God has told us plainly what He is like and has not left us to deduce it from His pauses. When He is displeased, Scripture shows Him saying so, at length, in words, through prophets, in a way nobody could miss. He is not a sulker. He is not a goer-quiet.

You have never once been given the silent treatment by God. The word says He is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy (Psalm 103:8), which is His own self-description given in words rather than left to be inferred, and it is the Holy Spirit who replaces an inherited reading with a true one, slowly, without shaming the woman who inherited it.

Turn us again

There is something in the refrain you might not have noticed, and it is a kindness.

Turn us again, O God. The psalmist does not say: I will turn myself round and then ask for the face. He asks God to do the turning, and then asks for the face, and both of those are requests rather than achievements.

Which means even the turning is not on you. If forty years of misreading have left you facing slightly the wrong way, the psalm has already handled that: you ask, and He turns you, and then the face shines.

You are turned by Him and not by an effort of your own. Scripture puts the turning and the shining in the same breath as two things God does, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that turning inside a person, because the word says it is God who works in you both to will and to do.

And I will not oversell it. Saying this does not mean the quiet ends. There may be a great deal more of it, and some of it may last, and I am not going to promise you a season of clear guidance because nobody can. What is settled is that quiet is not a verdict, and a woman who stops reading a face into a gap has forty years of her life read back to her differently.