A brief meditation on the lack of immediate response to our prayers

It often seems to us that God is silent. Or even more precisely, that God is absent. Often we seek God and want Him to do something, but He does not do anything, allowing events to develop as they would develop, this development can be dramatic and tragic for us, we can be shaken by injustice, sorrow, but despite that, God is silent. He does not interfere and does nothing.

Naturally, a protest can start boiling in a person, as if they would like to say to God: “Why are You not doing anything? Why aren’t You acting? Why don’t You interfere and stop this, all this injustice, because You see it, and it is against Your law?” However, God is silent.

God always acted like that. God did His work in silence. He appeared in the world, but at the same time as if absent in what is happening in this world, and not only in the personal life of a person, but even in the life of the Church. When we read lives of the saints, in particular, lives of martyrs of the first centuries of Christianity (as well as of our time), we see the following. There were Christians who were persecuted, who suffered martyrdom, paying with their blood for their faith in Christ. There were periods when it seemed that the Church was about to collapse, that the enemies of the Church had reached the apogee of their power, strength and glory, and the Church was falling to the very bottom of powerlessness and humiliation. Someone would say, “Why does not God intervene, why do heretics triumph? Why do things go so well with the enemies of the Church, and there is nothing good with us, and instead of good, we are going from worse to worse?

God acts like this in our lives. Why? Because He wants to change our way of thinking, He wants us to turn on repentance, a change of mind (metanoia) and of the very way we think, so that we move away from the worldly way of thinking, and enter God’s way of thinking, which is sacrifice, love, and kenosis (emptying oneself) for another person. Let us think and observe that the Lord Himself in His earthly life did this when He was taken, given into the hands of men, and humbled Himself in the most humiliating way.

 - Excerpt from  Metropolitan Athanasius of Limassol,  pravoslavie.ru, 2019