The salty Atlantic winds whip across my face, stinging my skin and creating chaos out of my long, brown hair. My pink cheeks and eyes, raw from the cold and crying, must offer a pop of color against the dreary gray landscape. I try to hide the colorful signs of my sorrow behind an oversized scarf and sunglasses, but it doesn’t matter. There isn’t another soul on the beach to witness my suffering on this frigid New England morning.

I sit alone on the jagged rocks, numb from a betrayal uncovered in an email the night before. My heart has been split wide open and now feels empty. Still new in town, I don’t know where to go or what to do.

So, I drive myself to the ocean’s edge to meet with God.

I hope to hear a divine whisper in the waves, for God to speak to me through His creation. I hope to feel the presence of God in the ways I had before. I think of Job, in his suffering, reminded of God’s creative majesty. I long for something similar — for my spirit to be jolted awake, to encounter something more expansive than my pain. The waves crash and the wind howls, but I sense nothing more.

Years earlier, when I learned that my newborn daughter’s condition was fatal, and in the shadow of her death, the presence of God felt unmistakably close and His voice undeniably clear, audible, almost. But this time it’s different. This time, I’m met with unbearable silence and disorienting absence.

In the months and years that follow my seemingly fruitless trip to the ocean, the spiritual practices that once grounded me — prayer, Scripture, worship, community — start to feel hollow and robotic. My faith falls quiet as I’m no longer as confident as I was before. I feel lost and adrift and, yet, I somehow sense I’m safely, inexplicably, still in God’s care.

From Job’s longing to find God in the midst of his suffering, to the psalmist’s cry (which was also echoed by Jesus on the cross), Scripture reveals that a time will come when we wonder where God has gone. Even still, I recall the truth that God’s ways are vaster than our imaginations: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9 NIV).

God colors outside the black-and-white lines we try to draw around Him and our lives. 

In a quiet corner of my home, with nothing to offer but my spirit broken open, I press colorful pigment into textured paper and sense God working in and through me. As I smooth and blend colors with my fingertips, the Holy Spirit — the with-ness of Creator God — stirs and soothes my soul. I sense myself as God’s creation, being shaped in the Potter’s hands (Isaiah 64:8).

In this return to art, I re-encounter God. It happens in silence, in a wordless space where spiritual impressions become colorful expressions.

I don’t curse God. I pick up a pastel. The act of creating becomes communion, the page a place of prayer, and the canvas a safe space for a holy conversation. This is how and when I realize the truth — a silent answer isn’t a dead end. Perhaps our questions are portals that propel us to open wider and create more room to listen differently and meet God in new and unexpected ways.

Whether we’re standing at the edge of the ocean, the edge of ourselves, or the edge of a page, there is always more than we can see, hear, or know. And maybe we can partake in the revealing of God and hope within us, as we continue to ask, “Where are you, God?”

If the old ways of connecting with God have gone quiet, if you feel lost or alone, don’t be afraid to persevere in faith and continue to seek God in a new way. Let your heart discover the language of hope spoken through creativity as a spiritual practice. Let the Holy Spirit guide your hands and stir your spirit. Let the silent, empty places be filled with the sacred making of something new. Let your creative offerings become more than expressions — let them be spaces of spiritual mending and formation.

Even if your hands feel empty, your heart uncertain, and God silent, pick up a pen, a brush, or a crayon and connect with the truth that God is still at work, creating something new and beautiful within you.

May we create, even when God seems silent and hope feels far, dear friends.

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