Winter may arrive the day the word comes back from the doctor's lab that the test was positive. All the dreams you took for granted — that you will watch your kids grow up and get married, that you will grow old with your spouse and die when you're good and ready — suddenly torture you with the thought that you won't be there to see them fulfilled.
Maybe winter comes when you feel as if you have failed as a parent. Or it arrives the day someone you loved with your whole heart has died. You prayed so hard, you hoped so much, you don't understand.
Any of these events may chill the soul. Any of them may announce the onset of winter. But they are not its worst feature. The hardest part of winter is that God seems gone.
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I cry to you for help, O LORD;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
Why, O LORD, do you reject me
and hide your face from me?
It is the aversion of God's face, what feels like his absence, that is the psalmist's greatest pain. C.S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife, "Where is God? . . . Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence."
This is hardest part of winter of the soul. It's not just this or that bad event.
We can't find God. He doesn't answer. "Why do you reject me? Why do you hide your face?"
Job and the Absence of God
Certain books of the Bible — Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and many of the psalms — are wintry books. But in all human history, no one has embodied winter more than a man named Job. In his book we come to the page where Waldo is hardest to find.
The story begins, "In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job." The reader has to try to figure out where Uz was. The directions are deliberately vague: "He was the greatest man among all the people of the East." The writer's point is that Job is not a part of Israel. You could put the setting like this: "A long time ago, in a place far, far away . . .
The problems in this book are the problems of the human race. All of us will wrestle at some time with the absence of God. In the beginning everything is as we think it should be. Job is "blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil." He is so cautious he even offers daily sacrifices for his children — "just in case," he thinks. Maybe they sinned. Maybe God is easily offended.
God gives him a wonderful life. The amount of blessing he experiences is directly proportional to the amount of obedience he offers.
But winter is coming to Uz. Uz will be a place where very bad things happen to a very good man. Uz will be a place, not just where suffering comes, but where it comes without warning and without explanation, creating confusion and despair.
