God's Not Absent... God Just May Be Quiet So You Can Practice Listening to a Frequency You Used to Drown Out

**Matthew Gottesman** (0:02)
Welcome to The Niche Is You. My name is Matt Gottesman, at Matt Gottesman on Instagram, and this is my daily podcast where I create short, quick hitting episodes to help you uncomplicate life, creativity, and the pursuit of your highest self. There's only main character energy here. Now let's get into it.
Welcome to episode 821, God's Not Absent. God just may be quiet so you can practice listening to a frequency you used to drown out. God's not absent. God just may be quiet. So you can practice listening to a frequency you used to drown out. I get asked this all the time. What do you do when you feel like God is quiet? I'm like, sit still and listen. They're like, no, I don't think you understood me. They always say the same thing. They're like, no, no, no, I'm saying like he's quiet. I'm like, no, no, no, I'm saying sit still. And they go like, no, no, no. Like I can't hear. I'm like, yes, sit still. Sometimes when we are operating for a very good chunk of time in a very loud world, we have to first quiet out the noise. We have to remove all of the distractions. And some of you may be saying like, I can't remove all of them. I don't mean like literally everything. I just mean, can you give yourself five minutes, 10 minutes a day? And can you just come back into yourself for the moment? And sometimes we interpret silence as distance. And I look at it as, no, no, no, no. It's an invitation, right? It's an invitation to hear God more clearly and to come back into yourself. So God's never absent. God's never absent. We're just, as humans, we get busy, we get distracted, we get, like everything becomes urgent and everything needs our immediate response. And I've learned to not operate that way. Now, again, obviously, there's certain things that we need to act diligently on out of just daily responsibilities, of course, or things or people that we, you know, need to be responsible for. I mean, that's the whole purpose of family and, you know, and whatnot. But what I'm saying is, is that we need to practice coming into ourself every day and spending time in prayer or silence or in just really with God, just to hear ourselves and to hear what God may have for us or to bring our things to God or to ask questions. It doesn't mean that immediately you might hear something. It's just a great way to move what maybe you're experiencing internally out and to through humility to God, right? But silence is an absence. Often, again, often silence is usually just like an invitation of, hey, do you want to like come sit with me and ask me some questions and, you know, just have a relationship, right? So in this episode, I want to talk about why silence from God is an absence and how we've been misreading it, you know, throughout life. Let's at least explore a possible misreading of it. I also want to talk about the Biblical pattern of God speaking in whispers, not noise.
God, here's the thing. I don't believe like God is loud. I believe that sometimes we end up in circumstances or experiences that can be very loud. And we go, why God, why? And God's like, I, you know, I didn't necessarily want that for you, you know. But if you're feeling like it's very loud, would you like to come sit over here with me and like we can discuss, you know, or can you take a moment out to, you know, step away from the chaos, step away from the big quote unquote big thing or the big circumstance that's happening and just simply ask me for direction or guidance or help, et cetera, right? I also want to talk about what you've been using to drown out the frequency you're now being asked to hear, right?
I also want to talk about why God goes quiet sometimes during seasons, and I don't think that it's necessarily like, imagine you ask for help and God's like, okay, I'll take it from here. And then you try to micromanage God like, well, what are you doing here? And what about this? And it's like, hey, hey, hey, hey, listen, listen, I want you to trust me. Yeah, but why this? Why that? Listen, listen, I want you to trust me. And what I think is an advantage in allowing that is one, it's how we build our faith walk, two, it's also how we calm ourselves out of an external world that is very loud and very distracting. So I kind of like where I take things to God and I'm like, hey, like I need help with this. What's going on? What should I focus on? Well, this and this, great. Anything else? No, just focus on this. And then listen, I found myself at times where I would keep going back and saying, hey, you know, in regards to this, what do you recommend? And the answer will still be the same. Now is God not working on anything behind the scenes? Now, of course, God is not just working on me, but working on what comes because of me focusing on the one step that I've been told to work on right now.