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God’s Silence and the Anger We’re Afraid to Feel

God’s Silence and the Anger We’re Afraid to Feel

Last updated on: October 19, 2026 at 1:39 pm by Eric Scot English

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God’s Silence and the Anger We’re Afraid to Feel 2026-10-19T13:39:16-04:00 Eric Scot English

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Man Suffering

Authors Note:

This article discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

God oftentimes feels silent to me. I don’t hear his voice as some claim to, nor speak a heavenly language as others do. For most of my life, God has been silent. I don’t think I am out of the ordinary. I think if most of us took a candid survey of our journey, we would say that God is largely imperceptible.

How do we actually perceive God in our lives, in the world, in anything? How does an immaterial being touch a physical one?

These are not idle questions. They constitute some of the most difficult problems in the Christian faith — the problem of evil, the problem of prayer, the problem of a God who is supposedly present but functionally absent when it matters most are all built on the aforementioned questions. I don’t have a tidy answer to any of them. What I have is a suspicion, and I want to work it out here, in public, because I think the suspicion is truer than the answer most of us were handed.

My question is simple. Why would God allow suffering for those who are busy doing the work he requires? Several years ago, my wife’s best friend died of cancer. She was 38. She was head of an organization that helped place abandoned children with families. Her work was important. Nothing in this world benefited from her death. In fact, her death made the world worse off. And yet the thousands of pleas for healing went unanswered.

Doing everything we’re told to do doesn’t seem to change the odds. Believer and unbeliever alike wade through the same silence, beg for the same miracles, and get them (or don’t) at roughly the same rate. If God exists, his mercy looks arbitrary.

Most of us think of God’s movement in our lives as something discerned only in hindsight — as though God only shows up in the rearview mirror. But I’m not writing this in hindsight. I’m writing it in the midst of suffering, because trying to understand something while you’re still inside it is more honest than waiting until it’s safely behind you — and because writing about it might help someone else inside their own version of it right now.

I Hate God

Right now, I hate God.

I say that with brutal honesty. I say it as someone who has spent twenty years telling people the truth is worth more than their comfort. So I’m not going to lie to you here and say everything is fine.

A few months back, I wrote about the suicide of R.L. Stollar. Stollar published a letter explaining why he was ending his life, and one line in it articulated something I had never been able to put into words myself but always felt deeply. Stollar said that he had spent his life “making excuses for a god who never raised a finger” to spare him from what was done to him as a child, and from everything that abuse went on to cost him.

Fortunately, I have not endured what Stollar endured. But I know the shape of the feeling. It’s the sense that God has seemingly ignored things from my own past that still profoundly affect me today — that the consequences of those things keep rearing their head, and that the lifelong struggle they’ve caused is met, more often than not, with divine silence.

The Lie We Tell About Trials

In the moment, we are always led to believe we are going through a “trial,” and that all we have to do is endure it a little bit longer. That’s a lie. Tell that to Stollar. Tell it to the thousands every year who take their own lives, or who succumb to the diseases their bodies and minds were never given the help to survive. How long are we supposed to “endure” before we’re allowed to ask why?

This is where our theology actually gets tested, not in the seminary classroom, but here. I don’t believe God proactively creates suffering. I think we as humans are remarkably capable of manufacturing that on our own, and have been since the beginning. Which means God is not the author of my trial, whatever it turns out to be. So my anger can’t honestly be directed at him for causing it.

But that doesn’t resolve the anger — It relocates it. Because if God didn’t cause this, and God is not absent, then the silence isn’t the silence of a God who is unaware. It’s the silence of a God who is resisting the request to help. And that is a much harder fact to swallow than “everything happens for a reason,” because it means the withholding is, in some sense, a choice.

The Blank Check We Were Promised

If you have been in the church any length of time, you have probably heard this passage quoted:

And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. ~John 14:13-14 (NET)

I have heard it invoked at hospital bedsides and before surgeries that didn’t go the way anyone prayed. It is treated as a contract — a formula where the right words, spoken with enough faith, guarantee a result. Say it correctly, and the universe owes you something. It’s a broken promise, a defaulted contract, evidence that God either can’t keep his word or was never listening in the first place. I understand why people walk away from faith entirely over exactly this kind of math. I’ve stood at the edge of that same walk-away more than once.

Here’s what I think “in my name” actually means, and it’s harder than the contract version: it means praying the way Christ prayed — in Gethsemane. It means asking for the cup to be taken away, and not getting that request granted. That is the only recorded prayer where we know for certain what Jesus asked for and what he didn’t get. If the formula worked, it would have worked there first. It didn’t. Not even for Jesus. What happened instead was submission to a will that did not match the request — not because the request was unfaithful, but because faithfulness and getting what you ask for were never the same thing to begin with.

So where does that leave a religion built on action and ethics — do this, live this way, and it will go well for you? I don’t think our actions were ever a down payment on exemption from suffering. That’s the same idealism I keep returning to in everything I write: treating God as a vending machine you can operate correctly with the right combination of obedience and language. My wife’s friend didn’t do the work she did because it would protect her. She did it because it was true and it was good, with no rider attached about what she’d get back. That is either the most devastating thing I know about faith, or the most honest — some days I genuinely can’t tell which.

What I can tell you is this: doing what you’re told to do was never the premium you pay to avoid suffering. It’s what faithfulness looks like whether or not suffering happens to you anyway. That’s cold comfort at 2 a.m. I know that. But it’s truer than the alternative, and I’d rather hand you something true and cold than something warm and false.

Where This Leaves Me

I don’t have a clean resolution to offer, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do — especially the version of Christianity that hands you “God won’t give you more than you can bear” and then simply walks away. That theology was built for people watching suffering from the outside. It was never built to hold someone standing inside it, asking why the help hasn’t come.

What I can say is this: the anger isn’t the crisis. The anger is the proof that the relationship is still alive. Stollar’s letter reads, to me, like someone who ran out of road before he found that out — who spent everything he had making excuses for God rather than being permitted to be furious at him. I don’t want that to be the only ending available to people like him, or people like me, or anyone reading this in the middle of something they can’t yet see the other side of.

If my faith has taught me anything, it’s that resurrection doesn’t happen by skipping the grave. It happens by actually going into it — naming what died, naming what was never true, and refusing to fake a resolution just to make the silence more bearable for everyone else in the room. I don’t know yet what resurrection looks like on the other side of this particular silence. I only know that pretending it isn’t silence is the one option I’ve ruled out.

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About Eric English

Eric is a rogue philosopher, theologian, author, podcaster and ninja. He is a father of three, husband of one, and a poet unto himself. Eric’s main areas of thinking are in philosophy (specifically, Soren Kierkegaard), theology (Narrative Perspectivism), and culture. Eric also hosts the podcast UNenlightenment. You can read more about the author here.

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