The Silence of My Suffering

I didn’t meet God in a church pew.

I met Him in the silence of my suffering.

It wasn’t dramatic.

It wasn’t one prayer.

Or one sermon.

Or one life-changing worship song.

It looked much messier than that.

I argued with Him.

Ran from Him.

Questioned Him.

Tried to hand Him my pain…

Then quietly took it back five minutes later.

He kept staying.

Eventually, I stopped running long enough to realize He had never left.

I am still learning what it means to trust God.

In many ways, I feel like I am learning it for the first time.

I’m learning to hand something to Him…

and leave it there.

I’m not very good at it yet.

Usually I surrender something in prayer and then spend the rest of the day trying to manage it myself.

I still want my decisions to be my own.

I still want certainty.

I still want to know where He’s leading before I take the next step.

But suffering has changed the way I seek Him.

It has changed the way I pray.

The way I worship.

The way I listen.

Not because I have all the answers now…

But because I finally know I don’t.

Right after my breakup, I cried constantly.

Thoughts consumed me.

I didn’t feel like myself.

I’ve always considered myself emotionally steady. Most days I live somewhere around a four on the emotional scale—not emotionless, just consistent.

Then suddenly…

Everything was at a ten.

Grief has a way of doing that.

It doesn’t just hurt.

It shrinks your entire world until all you can see is your own survival.

I remember sitting at my parents’ dinner table while they were telling me about a friend who was going through something difficult.

And I remember thinking…

Why are we talking about them?

Can’t you see I’m dying?

Even as the thought crossed my mind, I knew it wasn’t fair.

I knew it sounded selfish.

But that’s the thing about deep pain.

It doesn’t just hurt.

It narrows your vision.

For a season, all I could see was my own heartbreak.

I’ve always believed one of the healthiest ways through suffering is to step outside yourself.

Serve someone.

Listen to someone else’s story.

Volunteer.

Give.

I knew all of that.

I just couldn’t do it.

I simply didn’t have the capacity.

For a long time, I felt guilty about that.

Now I wonder if maybe I was judging myself too harshly.

I don’t think I became selfish because I stopped caring about other people.

I think caring about my own pain required everything I had.

Pain consumed all the bandwidth.

There simply wasn’t room for anything else.

So I made a decision.

I wasn’t going to numb it.

I wasn’t going to drink it away.

Shop it away.

Work it away.

Exercise it away.

I kept my routines.

I kept showing up.

But I let myself feel every bit of it.

The anxiety.

The tears.

The anger.

The loneliness.

I stopped trying to outrun the pain.

And somewhere in that silence…

I met God.

Not because the pain disappeared.

It didn’t.

Not because I suddenly understood why everything had happened.

I still don’t.

But because He sat with me there.

Slowly, something began to change.

Not overnight.

Not dramatically.

One day I realized I was listening to someone else’s story again.

I noticed someone else’s pain.

I felt compassion returning.

My world had become big enough to hold someone else’s hurt alongside my own.

That’s when I knew something inside me had healed.

Not because I wasn’t hurting anymore.

Because pain was no longer the only thing I could see.

Looking back, I don’t think God asked me to rush past my suffering.

I think He asked me to sit with Him in it.

To stop trying to fix it.

To stop trying to escape it.

To let it do its quiet work.

The silence wasn’t empty after all.

It was where He had been waiting for me all along.