When God is Silent by Barbara Brown Taylor

This little book "When God is Silent"  is the 1997 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching that Barbara Brown Taylor delivered at Yale Divinity School during the Fall Convocation. The original audience included seminarians, clergy, professors, and lay people. Her focus is on the task of preaching in a world where people thirst for a word from God. How do we as Christians hear this word from a God who often seems to be silent? How do we speak with truth and restraint of the incarnate God? And how do we listen to the Word of God spoken in the midst of silence? It offers three sections: Famine, Silence, Restraint. She ends these lectures with this thought:

"In  a way that surpasses understanding, our duty in this time of famine is not to end the human hunger and thirst for God's word, but to intensify it, until the whole world bangs its forks for God's food.  That is what the famine is for, according to scripture. That is why God has hidden God's face: to increase our sense of loss until we are so hungry and lonely for God that we do something about it --- not only one by one but also as a people who are once again ready to leave our fleshpots in search of real food."

There are many re-reads ahead of me starting next week.