Show Me Your Face, Lord: Prayers in the Wilderness: from Selfish to Silent

By Sally Silvershoes

Sally Silvershoes had been asking God to reveal more of himself and was led to discover that this only happens through prayer, Gods grace, and most often, during wilderness experiences. She traces the development of her prayer life, starting with childhood prayer while growing up in Africa, to praying scripture while living in Canada, and then onto spontaneously individual prayer somewhere between Canada and Australia. The prayer journey culminates in silent, contemplative prayer as kookaburras break the early morning silences on Australias east coast. Sallys adventures in prayer took place amid stretching family circumstances, during short-term mission trips, when serving on mission boards, while teaching English to migrants, and sometimes, when just sitting doing nothing at all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781973622727

Sally Silvershoes

In her book “Show Me Your Face, Lord”, Sally Silvershoes traced her quest to draw closer to God through wilderness experiences, prayer and His grace. Her continuing desire for greater intimacy with the Lord, and passion for the Gospel message of the Cross to be preached to all nations, has led her to serve on mission boards and undertake short-term mission trips to various locations. And putting into practice her M.A. in Christian Studies, she has discovered that the adventure of following God also happens in the places of quiet and solitude, where daily experiences - from stretching family circumstances, to teaching English to migrants, and from serving on prayer ministry teams to singing “Yes Jesus loves you” to shelter kittens – always bring her one small step deeper into the heart of God.

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Copyright © 2018 Sally Silvershoes.

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Interior Graphics Credit: Tim Gray (photographer)

Unless otherwise cited, all scripture quoted from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-9736-2271-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-2272-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018903077

WestBow Press rev. date: 04/17/2018

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TO THOSE WHO PROVIDED REASON AND INSPIRATION FOR WRITING

My husband

My son

My daughter

My mother and the memory of my father

And most of all, the good and faithful Triune God, because:

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet[a] no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

(Ecclesiastes 3:11)

Contents

Chapter 1   The Changing Faces of God

Chapter 2   The Journey Begins with Super-God: God of Miracles and Healings

Chapter 3   First Stage Prayers

Chapter 4   God’s Grace: Remaining on the Journey with a Disobedient God

Chapter 5   A Dry and Weary Land with A Strange God

Chapter 6   Wilderness Companions: Fear and Grace

Chapter 7   Heartbreak and A New God

Chapter 8   More Wilderness Companions: Faith and Doubt

Chapter 9   Signposts for Prayer

Chapter 10   Trusworthy Companions on our Journey: Obedience, Grace and the Holy Spirit

Chapter 11   Angels and the End of an Era

Chapter 12   A New Way of Praying: From Striving to Resting

Chapter 13   More on Contemplative Prayer: Composition of Place, Lectio Divina, Visio Divina

Chapter 14   Discernment, Review of Prayer, The Examen and Spiritual Direction

Chapter 15   The Prayers of Celtic Spirituality

Chapter 16   Where Am I Now?

Bibliography

Introduction

A funny thing happened on the way to my ’50s… I suddenly realized that I didn’t really know God.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d certainly experienced Him, or at least, what I thought was Him. I’d seen His miracles, I’d received His answers to prayer, been amazed at His jaw-dropping healings and interventions. I’d received ‘words of knowledge’ from Him (and even sometimes given them), seen Him save sinners, and deliver from demons. I had been keenly aware of His goodness, the anointing of His peace, and His numinous Presence. I could go on and on, but the point is, I became more unsettled and dissatisfied with what I came to feel were really manifestations of symbols of Him. As wonderful as all these things were, it wasn’t Him. I knew about Him, about what He could, might and probably would or would not do, but like Moses and David and countless millions before me, I wanted to see Him, be with Him, talk to Him, and, like Job, get direct answers! I wanted to know Him, up close and personal. I wasn’t satisfied with this long-distance relationship. Psalm 27 became my mantra:

One thing I asked of the LORD,

that will I seek after:

to live in the house of the LORD

all the days of my life,

to behold the beauty of the LORD,

and to inquire in his temple.

(Psalm 27:4 NRSV)

One thing I ask of You, Lord…. Would it really be so difficult, Lord, to answer my one request to see your face?

I had just assumed that God would answer by taking me on a happy excursion through green pastures and blue skies, and any rain (God forbid!) would be light and refreshing and taste like lemonade. Little did I then realise that the answer to my rather flippant question was, "Yes, indeed, you will face many difficult times ahead!"

In the meantime, my questions to those ‘in the know’ drew the usual advice. Read a Bible with a good concordance. Pray more. Try journaling. Listen to more worship music. Get more involved with ministry. I tried all these things, and am truly thankful that they have seen me take major strides in my journey. But I felt that God was still being somewhat evasive, even though I understood deep in my heart, and from Scripture itself,¹ that God really does want us to seek His face. So, I decided to explore one last option open to me, and I enrolled in the city’s most reputable inter-denominational Bible college. A few years later, I had advanced light years in terms of Bible knowledge and prayer, and had made some considerable progress in my quest, but deep-down I was still searching for the holiest of Holy Grails, God Himself, despite the warnings that no-one ever sees God and lives to tell the tale!

Lou Holtz, a famous American football coach once observed, God looks after children, animals and idiots. God, obviously a football fan, had evidently begun to feel for my plight as an idiot, and eventually and strategically placed a book in my path, which I successfully managed to overlook for a year (having successfully managed to overlook it for years as it sat on Bible college book shelves heaving under the weighty insights of Calvin and Barth). And so it was that I finally picked up Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines, and the genie was out of the bottle. Richard Foster wasn’t wrong when he wrote on the back cover of the book, If you wrestle with the themes of this book and weave them into the warp and weave of everyday life, you will be changed forever. With that endorsement ringing in my ears, I was naturally led to Richard Foster’s Streams of Living Water. Scales which had covered 50% of my already limited spiritual insight began to fall from my eyes, and the more I read about the spiritual disciplines, and about practices of other Christian traditions, the more excited I became at the prospect of inching upward out of my ‘miry clay,’ which until then, seemed to have collided with, and was solidly welded against the proverbial glass ceiling. After trialling new and exciting disciplines, like journaling, silence, fasting, lectio divina and the daily Examen, and reading the lives of great ‘saints’ (both Protestant and Catholic), I began to sense that there might be, if not God Himself in full splendid regalia, at least a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel to guide me forward on my quest.

Don’t misunderstand. I had not turned my back on the evangelical, Pentecostal or Reformed positions, and I still held fast to Biblical teachings. I had read enough about the ‘big names’ in those traditions to understand that not a few of them knew God as intimately as is possible this side of eternity. But what I hadn’t managed to find out from them, or anyone else, is how they managed that closeness, apart from a considerable prayer life. And the problem was that exactly how and what they prayed in private was most often not a matter of public record. So, why were they so blessed? What was their secret?

And then it happened, about the same time as Foster and I crossed paths. The wilderness. The dry and weary land where there is no water. (Psalm 63:1 NRSV)

I had read somewhere that no-one really gets close to God except through great love or great suffering, and up until that point I suppose my life had been pretty standard ordinary, which by western world standards equals very blessed. Out of nowhere, and without warning, my world was shaken, rattled and rolled, and as things descended from bad to worse under a welter of literally life-changing, it not life-threatening circumstances, I oscillated between the extremes of astonished immobility and bewildered amusement, interspersed with a range of hitherto new, but not so exciting emotions. I often huffily informed God that He was cruel, and it was over between us, only to later find myself peeking over my shoulder to see if He was following me to apologize. He never did appear cap-in-hand, but what He did do was so much better, because when I wasn’t frozen, laughing in disbelief, crying, sulking or whining, He managed to coax me into prayer. And, thanks to His long-time preparation of me for such a time as this, I prayed as I never had before, in ways I never had before, intertwining all that He had led me to absorb about prayer from the different Christian traditions. And that realisation opened my eyes to what is really at the nub of our coming to know Him – it is only by His grace that we embark on the journey in the first place, with all of its ups and downs and twists and turns, and it is only His grace that keeps us on the quest. For, even with that grace, we lose heart, complain, and turn aside to disappear down countless dead-end alleys. But His graciousness keeps calling us back to the comfort of His Presence and the sanity of His ways.

The roller-coaster ride of my life continued unabated for over 10 years, only recently slowing to a gallop, and although life is nowhere near the relatively plain sailing of the old days, God and I have struck up a new and deeper relationship. While we generally meet in green pastures and beside still waters, there are times when we huddle together in the wilderness bracing against the howling desert djinns. And therein probably lies one of the main keys to my better understanding of God, to feeling a little closer to Him, and almost, dare I say, to catching fleeting glimpses of His face on occasion. Through my wilderness experiences and His grace, I have felt His pain as He watches and suffers for us, and, as my heart broke, I have cried for Him and what I believe to be His broken and yearning heart. I am no longer searching for Him in the same way, because I have come so much closer to Him, but in a far different way to that which I could have ever imagined. There is less urgency and far more peace, less understanding and far more knowing. And His face? His face is nowhere and everywhere, infusing His creation with His eternal presence. Despite His often long absences, His nearness is an invisible reality, and let’s not forget – I’m no-one special! If I can get to this point, anyone can!

The reason I’m writing this is because, as I’ve journeyed, I have come across fellow pilgrims of a similar age, on a similar quest. They too sit, feet in the mire and heads glued up against that glass ceiling, not sure how to break through, but eagerly digesting books and websites that I have recommended. I feel it’s about time that I put in writing something of what I have discovered on my own journey, about God, prayer, the wilderness and His grace, and how they intertwine according to His plan for our journey. As the psalmist says

The human mind plans the way,

but the LORD directs the steps

(Proverbs 16:9 NRSV)

No-one’s journey is the same, but I believe each journey contains these major ingredients (God’s face, His grace, wilderness and prayer), in varying quantities determined by God, and according to the outcome that God desires. And to assist in the readers’ journeys, I have also included excerpts from my prayers and journals, both as an encouragement and perhaps as something of a resource, because, if those readers are anything like me, they will find God speaking to them in a myriad of ways, which include scripture, prayers, art, music and poetry, and of course, his creatures and his creation in general.

The story of the bible is the story of a journey. Travellers do not all take the same route, but the sign-posts and spiritual guides they have used are often similar. Pathways through deserts are hard to find and it is useful to have some knowledge of how others have found their way.²

Naturally, the psalmist’s 150 prayers have been my constant delight in this regard, covering all aspects of our journey: suffering, praise, thanksgiving, even imprecation, and of course, the yearning to see God’s face. But I have also encountered many other wonderful