In chapter 2 Foster talks about the prayer of the forsaken. The why’s of brokenness. The what’s happening to me’s. The “Where are you, Lord?” Jesus’ cry of “My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?” and David’s cry of “I call all day, my God, but you never answer.” Not only are times filled with these prayers times of great hurt, but they also are times where God becomes very difficult to understand. In fact, it is this hiddenness of God that often drives people to deny that God exists altogether. “Surely an all-good and all-powerful would never hide Himself from those who need Him?!” argues many atheists and careful agnostics.
Addressing this plaintive prayer, Foster writes:
If we could make the Creator of heaven and earth instantly appear at our beck and call, we would not be in communion with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and jacob. We do that with objects, with things, with idols. But God, the great iconoclast, is constantly smashing our false images of who he is and what he is like.
Can you see how our very sense of the absence of God is, therefore, an unsuspected grace? In the very act of hiddenness God is slowly weaning us of fashioning him in our own image. Like Aslan, the Christ figure in The Chronicles of Narnia, God is wild and free and comes at will. By refusing to be a puppet on our string or a genie in our bottle, God frees us from our false, idolatrous images.
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