When Your Feed Is Full of Miracles and God Feels Silent

Open X on a Sunday morning and you can feel the contrast in two scrolls. One corner of the feed is full of joyful testimony: answered prayers, blocked disasters, breakthroughs declared with capital letters. Another corner is quieter and rawer — people admitting that they prayed, waited, and heard nothing. Someone writes, “Where is God??!” Someone else asks what happens when God does not answer. Both posts can sit next to each other in the same hour.

Sunday’s theme on this blog is the hiddenness of God. Not the usual philosophical question of why the Creator does not put on a louder show for sceptics — we have walked that path before. Today’s question is more intimate, and more common: what do you do when other people’s faith looks loud and yours feels silent? If God is near, why does prayer sometimes feel like speaking into an empty room?

Two kinds of noise

Online Christianity has a volume problem. Platforms reward clarity, drama and resolution. A testimony that fits in two lines travels farther than a long season of waiting. None of that makes testimonies false. Scripture itself is full of answered prayer. Israel crosses the sea. Hannah receives a child. The early Church sees doors open and prisons unlock. Catholics can and should rejoice when God grants what was asked. Gratitude is not marketing; it is justice toward a Giver.

But volume is not the same as depth. When every feed suggests that real faith always looks like a breakthrough, the person sitting in dryness can start to suspect they are spiritually defective. That is a cruel and unnecessary conclusion. The Bible does not treat silence as a rare glitch. It treats it as part of the life of faith.

Psalm 13 begins with a question that would look awkward on a highlight reel: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” Psalm 22 goes further: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — words Jesus himself takes to the Cross. Isaiah, speaking for Israel, does not invent a cheerful slogan. He confesses, “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Saviour” (Isaiah 45:15). Hiddenness is not a modern crisis invented by social media. It is an old biblical category.

Elijah and the still small voice

One of the clearest pictures comes from 1 Kings 19. Elijah has just seen fire fall on Mount Carmel. If ever a prophet had reason to expect God to keep speaking in spectacle, it was him. Instead he flees, exhausted and afraid. At Horeb the Lord is not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire. Then comes “a still small voice” — or, in some careful translations, “a sound of sheer silence.”

Notice the order. God does not deny the earlier miracle. He simply refuses to be reduced to it. The God who can answer with fire is also free to teach a prophet to listen when the show is over. That is not divine coldness. It is divine freedom. If God only ever arrived as spectacle, faith would collapse into entertainment management. We would chase the next earthquake and miss the Lord who stands in the quiet afterward.

Catholic prayer takes that lesson seriously. The Catechism says contemplative prayer is silence — “silent love” — in which the Father speaks his Word and the Spirit enables us to share in the prayer of Jesus (CCC 2717). It also refuses to romanticise the hard part. Dryness, it says, is a real difficulty for people who sincerely want to pray: the heart can feel separated from God, with no taste for thoughts or feelings, even spiritual ones. That can be “the moment of sheer faith clinging faithfully to Jesus in his agony and in his tomb” (CCC 2731). Discouragement in dryness is named as one of the battles of prayer, and the answer given is humility, trust and perseverance (CCC 2728).

Silence is not always absence

Here a distinction matters. Sometimes we do not hear God because we are distracted, unrepentant, or asking for what would harm us. Honesty requires that possibility. Scripture never tells us to baptise every desire and call the silence God’s fault. Conversion, confession and a reordered life can clear a lot of static.

But not every silence is our failure. Christian tradition — especially the Carmelite stream associated with St John of the Cross — has long recognised seasons when God seems to withdraw felt consolations in order to purify love. The point is not that misery is holy. The point is that love can become more real when it is no longer propped up by emotional reward. A faith that only survives while it feels successful is still apprenticing. A faith that stays when the feelings thin out is learning to love God for God, not for the buzz.

That does not mean we should pretend unanswered prayer is easy. Illness, grief, infertility, injustice, a child who walks away from faith — these are not Instagram captions. The Church’s answer is not “try harder positivity.” It is the Cross: God has entered the place where prayer sounds like abandonment, and he has not left it empty. In Christ, divine hiddenness is not God playing hide-and-seek for sport. It is God coming close enough to share the night.

“If God loved me, he would answer more clearly”

That is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight reply. If a loving parent would not leave a child crying in the dark, how can a loving God leave prayers hanging?

The analogy helps until it breaks. A good parent does not give a child every asked-for object on demand, and does not narrate every decision in real time. Love sometimes looks like presence without explanation. More importantly, Christianity claims something stranger than a cosmic parent with better communication skills. It claims that God has already spoken his clearest Word — not as a text message tailored to every mood, but as a Person: Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. The Eucharist, Scripture, the sacramental life of the Church, the quiet fidelity of ordinary Christians — these are not second-rate substitutes for a private miracle. They are the ordinary means by which the hidden God makes himself known.

Does that remove the ache? No. It relocates it. We are not left with a mute universe. We are left with a God who has spoken once for all in the Son, and who still forms disciples in ways that refuse to flatter our appetite for constant proof. Demand for perpetual clarity can become its own idol: not love of God, but love of control.

How to live the quiet faithfully

So what helps when your feed is loud and your prayer is not?

First, stop comparing spiritual seasons. Someone else’s answered prayer is not a verdict on yours. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Refuse the lie that silence means you have been deselected.

Second, keep the ordinary means. Mass. Confession. A daily portion of Scripture. A short, honest prayer you can still say when you feel nothing — the Our Father, a decade of the Rosary, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” The Catechism’s counsel is not glamorous: humble vigilance and perseverance.

Third, tell the truth to God. The psalms give you permission. Complaining in faith is still prayer. Pretending you are fine when you are not is not holiness; it is theatre.

Fourth, stay near people who can sit with you without forcing a tidy ending. A good friend or a wise priest will not rush you into a fake testimony. They will keep watch with you, as the disciples were asked to do in Gethsemane.

If your timeline is currently full of miracles, thank God — and remember the quiet ones scrolling past. If your timeline feels empty and your own heart matches it, you are not outside the story. You may be standing where Elijah stood after the fire: learning that the Lord who can shout is also content to whisper, and sometimes to teach us in the silence between.

Where has God’s silence met you lately — and what has helped you stay, even when the feed suggested everyone else was getting breakthroughs? I would be glad to hear your thoughts in the comments.

— Noah Marshall