The Psalmist cries out, more than once, that God has hidden his face. It is one of the most honest complaints in Scripture. This sonnet sits with that hiddenness, and refuses both the easy denial and the harder despair, in favor of the older and stranger trust.
The Sonnet
Your face is hidden. This I will not lie About, nor pretend the fog is nothing new, Nor whisper reassurance to the sky When all the sky returns is muted blue. I look, and look, and cannot find You there, The features I once traced in every day Have blurred, as if withdrawn behind some air, As if the light I loved has turned away. And yet the Psalmist made this same complaint, And walked out somehow with a deeper trust, A faith more steady, if a little faint, A love that had been sifted like the dust. So I will name the hiding for what it is, And trust the God whose absence still is His.
Reflection
The Psalms are astonishingly honest about the hiddenness of God. Again and again the poets ask, how long will you hide your face from me? They do not paper over the experience with pious phrases. They name it, they grieve it, and then they turn, somehow, back toward the very God whose face they cannot find.
This is one of the strangest and most important patterns in the life of faith. The believer who has experienced the hiddenness of God, and stayed, discovers a trust that could not have been forged any other way. It is not the trust of those who have never been in the fog. It is the trust of those who kept walking through it, and found, when they came out the other side, that Someone had been walking with them all along.
If the face of God is hidden from you today, do not turn away. Say so plainly, as the Psalmist did. The hiding is not the end of the relationship. Sometimes it is where the deeper part of it begins.
