God seems to be indifferent to the violence, the hurt. The spouse caught up in an abusive marriage. The parent with a prodigal child. Children who now have quarrelsome and difficult parents. Christians watching society come apart at the seams. Where is the revival? Where is the return us the years that the locust have eaten?...Where are the days of the great awakening and the blessing? Lord, how long, how long do I need to do this? I have been praying this for forty years, and things are worse! The country is going to hell in a handbasket. Every day just seems worse. Every day you read a headline and you think, well, it cannot get any worse than this, and it does. And you say, Lord, how long? Is it that you do not care?

I know you do not say things like that in prayer, but you think it! And you think that God is not listening because he only listens when you actually vocalize that prayer. [You think] that he does not know your thoughts before you put the prayer together. It is what the disciples said in the boat when Jesus was asleep and there was a storm. They had been in storms before, but this was a humdinger of a storm, and they thought, this is it, we are going to drown. So they shook him and they said, Lord, don’t you care that we perish? Imagine that! Don’t you care? I am sure those words haunted them for the rest of their lives: what possessed us to say that to Jesus? Of course he cares! But it feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it? The silence, the long unending silence, sort of suggests that God does not care, that he is indifferent.¹

Derek W. H. Thomas