If God is Real, Where is He?

The kitchen floor was cold beneath me, the wall behind my back only slightly warmer. The house was silent again, but it was always this way. I had nobody in the world. I strained my ears to hear something, anything besides the soft hum of the refrigerator to my right.

“Where are you?” My whisper was barely audible. “Say something. Please.”

The hum of the refrigerator continued on.

“Where are you?” My voice was louder now. I was practically yelling at the ceiling and found myself suddenly grateful for the empty house.

Again, I was met with silence.

The first of the tears fell then, and I buried my head my arms, rocking myself softly. My fingers pulled at my hair, reaching to clasp onto anything that could ground me. “Are you even there at all?”

Over my short twenty-one years, I have spent many nights on the kitchen floor, begging for God to reveal His presence, praying for the smallest glimpse that He was there; or even real for that matter. Each of those nights I was met with silence. Each of those nights I felt abandoned by God.

When life changes, when the light vanishes and you are left utterly alone, pleading for some indication that you’ll be okay, why does God leave you? Why does He remain hidden from your eyes?

Most of the answers I’ve come up with aren’t necessarily reassuring, at least, not in the moment of our pain. God, by necessity, needs to remain somewhat ambiguous. He has to be partially unknown because we have to learn to have faith in Him. If He simply spoke to us every time we sought out His help, we wouldn’t need to believe, we’d already know that He is. If He came and stood before us, in all His heavenly glory, I imagine it would be almost impossible to deny His existence and His power. We wouldn’t need to choose Him. We wouldn’t have much of a choice in choosing Him. We’d just know.

Where’s the agency in that?

As heartbreaking as it is, God may allow us from time to time to struggle with our faith. He may choose not to interfere as we doubt and struggle to once again find the foundation of our testimony. He may occasionally allow us to sit in the dark.

Why? Doesn’t He care about our lives? Doesn’t He love us?

The answer is a resounding yes. God’s entire purpose is to help us, His children, become like Him. We are gods in embryo. But if we are to become like Him, we have to experience the full spectrum of mortality. We have to experience the peaks and the valleys, the joy and the heartbreak, the blessings of obedience and the sorrows of sin. And we have to choose. We have to use our agency every day to learn how to govern wisely. We have to have faith so that we can accept the atonement of Jesus Christ, make and keep sacred covenants, and ultimately, come home.

That is God’s plan for us. That is His ultimate hope and desire. That is His motivation behind everything He does. And you know what? I think God loves us too much to allow any temporary pain to deter us from our eternal potential. Although we can’t see how the sorrow will end, He can. He sees beyond the pain to see the purpose. He sees the potential for you and me to become like Him.

So what do we do when God leaves us? Where should we turn when it appears we have been abandoned?

First, I’d like to bear testimony to you that He is there, even when it seems like He’s not. I’ve developed a testimony of that over ten years of failing health and fractured faith that I learned to stitch back together every time it fell apart. He is real. He is there. He does care.

He’s just silent for the moment.

When I learned I couldn’t hear God, I started to look for Him instead. Where could I see Him right now? Where had I seen Him before?

I had seen Him every time I’d felt small and unsure, alone in another hospital room, but somehow confident that I wasn’t truly alone. I had seen Him in the grace that my friends and family always seemed to offer me. I had seen Him in the eyes of the children I took care of, in the pages of the Book of Mormon, inside the walls of the Holy Temple.

I had heard Him in every Priesthood blessing that was given to help me get through the night. I felt arms that I could not see, holding me tightly when my body was tormented with pain that I cannot even begin to describe to you. In those moments, I had felt my Spirit resonate with God’s. In a transcendent sort of way, I had felt connected with heaven and convinced of its existence. That memory sustains me when I begin to doubt and wonder again.

The more I remember about my past experiences with God, the more I have been able to stay grounded during the times when it feels like He’s not there at all. It’s hard. Remembering the goodness of God in moments when He doesn’t appear to be good at all is a difficult choice to make. But it's so important for us to do. Alma knew this too. Listen to his reflection.

“...then do I remember what the Lord has done for me, yea, even that he hath heard my prayer; yea, then do I remember his merciful arm which he extended towards me.

Yea, and I also remember the captivity of my fathers; for I surely do know that the Lord did deliver them out of bondage, and by this did establish his church; yea, the Lord God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, did deliver them out of bondage.” (Alma 29:10-11)

When I remember my captivity, bondage, and subsequent delivery, I too know that God had heard my prayers. I too can see how His hand was continually extended towards me.

It’s hard to see. It’s even harder to see in the very moment when things are dark and seemingly hopeless. But remembering His appearance and voice in our own lives is essential if we want to keep Him alive in us. How will we recognize His voice in the future if we’ve forgotten what He sounded like in the past?

If you’ve never felt connected to Him, or you can’t think of any prior experiences where you felt His love or presence, I would invite you to dive into the scriptures and study. See how He rescued His people from captivity in the Old Testament, how He gave the world hope in the New Testament. Read about how the Savior took the time to minister to and heal His people in the Americas. Study the direction He gave to the Prophet Joseph Smith. Look at your own Patriarchal Blessing. Can you see Him? Can you hear Him?

Maybe God is staying quiet during your most heartbreaking times. Maybe that makes you angry. Maybe you’ll find yourself crying on the kitchen floor, yelling up at the ceiling. But I hope that in those moments, we can still choose to believe in Him. He isn’t gone. He is real and He is really with you, even when He stays quiet. I believe that. I believe that so much in fact, that my cute friend and I wrote a song about it. (Low quality, I know. Bear with me, okay?)