By Cliff Potts

I was taught early that God pays attention. Not in a vague way, but specifically—that prayers are heard, suffering is noted, and justice, if delayed, is still inevitable. Childhood faith runs on that assumption. It has to. Without it, the stories don’t work. The heroes endure. The faithful are tested, not ignored. Silence, when it appears, is always temporary.

Adulthood complicates that story.

Life doesn’t unfold in parables. It unfolds in systems—economic, medical, bureaucratic—that do not pause for prayer. People fall through cracks that are well documented and never repaired. Hard work fails to protect the diligent. Kindness does not guarantee mercy. The people who speak most confidently about God’s plan often seem the least affected by its absence.

For a long time, I tried to translate experience back into theology. I reread Scripture not as revelation, but as text—historical, political, literary. The Psalms helped more than the epistles. Lament is at least honest. “How long, O Lord?” is a question, not an answer. Job refuses the easy explanations and is punished for his honesty only to be vindicated later, though never truly answered. Ecclesiastes shrugs and tells the truth: much of this is vanity, chasing wind.

What struck me, reading these texts as an adult, is how often God is already silent inside them. The Bible does not hide this. It is full of unanswered prayers, deferred justice, and long stretches where nothing happens except waiting. What modern religion adds is confidence—confidence that the silence is meaningful, purposeful, even loving. That confidence does not survive long exposure to real loss.

As years accumulate, faith becomes less about belief and more about endurance. Not endurance as virtue, but endurance as fact. You keep going because stopping does not undo what has already happened. The language around belief grows thinner. “God never gives you more than you can handle” collapses under even mild scrutiny. “Everything happens for a reason” sounds less like wisdom and more like avoidance.

There is a particular loneliness that comes from feeling not just unseen by the world, but irrelevant to God. Not punished. Not tested. Simply unnoticed. The sermons never prepared me for that possibility. Silence was always framed as intimacy, as listening, as God working behind the scenes. But decades pass. Patterns repeat. Outcomes remain stubbornly unchanged. At some point, interpretation becomes denial.

This is where performative belief breaks down. The public confidence, the slogans, the insistence that faith must resolve into joy or certainty—it all starts to feel dishonest. Not malicious. Just hollow. Many people I know no longer reject God so much as step quietly away from the conversation. They are tired of being told what their suffering is supposed to mean.

I do not have a cleaner theology to offer. I am not interested in reconstructing faith into something more marketable or comforting. If God is present, that presence does not announce itself. If there is moral order, it is not self-enforcing. The world is loud with injustice, randomness, and indifference. God, if there, is not competing for airtime.

I still read Scripture. I still think about God. Not as authority to be defended, but as absence to be acknowledged. Silence, after all, is also a kind of answer—or at least a condition that cannot be argued away.

There are no closing assurances here. No restoration arc. Just the reality that belief, stripped of performance, sometimes ends in quiet unresolved tension. And the silence remains.

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