Before I go further, I want to be clear about what this article is. It's a reflection of my own spiritual journey, one specific season of it, and nothing more. It isn't a statement about what your journey should look like, what you should believe, or what name you should give to whatever you hold sacred, if you hold anything sacred at all. Whatever your relationship to faith is, agnostic, devout, somewhere in the middle, or still deciding, The Rebound is safe ground for you here. You don't have to believe what I believe to get something out of this.

Somewhere in the middle of my divorce, I got on my knees every night and asked for one thing: a sign. Not even a resolution. Just something. A feeling, a verse that landed different, a conversation that felt like it was aimed at me. I wasn't asking God to fix my marriage anymore by that point. I just wanted to know I was still being heard.

Months went by. Nothing came. No peace, no clarity, no moment where the weight lifted. I kept praying anyway, mostly out of habit, and I remember thinking that if God was going to speak, this would have been the time. A man losing his home, his family structure, and his sense of who he was seemed like exactly the kind of person who'd get an answer. I didn't get one.

Someone wrote that line thousands of years ago, in the middle of their own unanswered prayer. You are not the first person to ask in silence where the answer went.

This Isn't a Story About Losing Faith

I want to be precise about what this article is and isn't. It's not about a man who prayed, got nothing, and walked away from God. That's a different article, and plenty of men live that version. This is about what happens when you keep praying, keep believing there's a purpose on the other side of the pain, and the silence doesn't go away. You don't stop believing. You just stop hearing anything back for a while.

Years after my divorce, I sat in church on a Sunday that landed at an odd moment. I'd just taken a new job to support my daughters, and it had turned into the worst professional relationship of my life. The job didn't last. My fear of financial ruin was running straight into whatever faith I had left that things would work out. That morning, my pastor preached on Job, of all people. He pointed out that before Job got a single answer to his suffering, God answered him with a question of His own: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (Job 38:4).

God met Job's suffering with a bigger question instead of an explanation, and somehow, that bigger question was what let him stand back up.

The Research on Why the Silence Isn't the Whole Story

Psychologist Kenneth Pargament has spent decades studying what researchers call religious and spiritual struggle: the experience of feeling distant from God, angry at God, or abandoned by God during a major life crisis. Along with colleagues Julie Exline and Joshua Grubbs, Pargament's research, published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, found something counterintuitive: people who wrestle openly with a period of spiritual struggle, rather than suppressing it or pretending it isn't happening, are more likely to report spiritual growth afterward than people who never struggle at all. The wrestling is doing something. It isn't a sign the faith has failed.

Pastoral psychology has a name for this that predates modern research by four centuries. The Spanish mystic John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul: a period where the felt presence of God disappears, not as punishment, but as a stage many contemplatives describe as necessary for a faith that no longer depends on feeling something to keep going. Researchers writing in the journal Pastoral Psychology have documented similar patterns in patients working through serious illness with hospital chaplains, describing spiritual struggle as a frequent, and often productive, part of coping with crisis.

You'll find versions of this across traditions that have nothing else to do with each other. Jewish and Christian scripture both carry entire books of lament, prayers written specifically for when no answer is coming. Islamic teaching on sabr treats patience through hardship, without demanding to understand the hardship first, as its own form of faith. Buddhist practice asks something adjacent of anyone, faith tradition or not: sit with the uncertainty instead of forcing a resolution you can't actually produce. If you don't hold any of these frameworks, the same principle still applies in plain terms: you can keep making the next right decision without first getting proof that it will work out.

Even Mother Teresa, a woman whose life was built entirely around serving God's poor, wrote for decades in private letters, later published and widely reported on, about feeling no divine presence at all during most of her public ministry. She kept doing the work regardless. For a lot of people, that detail is the most relatable part of her entire story.

What Steve Berlack Learned From His Own Silence

I didn't get my sign. What I got, months later, looking back, was a life that had rebuilt itself in ways I couldn't have engineered on my own: relationships I still have, doors that opened at exactly the moment I needed them to, a purpose I didn't have language for while I was still on my knees asking for relief. All of it arrived while I kept moving, kept working, kept showing up for my daughters, long after I'd stopped demanding an explanation first.

Job took a step back once he understood the size of the question he was asking. I've had to take that same step back more than once, most recently the year I wrote about the sermon on my hundredth blog post. The silence simply meant I wasn't finished with the story yet.

Your Move

The silence you're in right now is proof that you're still in it, nothing more and nothing less. Job didn't get his answer until he stopped demanding one on his own terms. You might not either. Keep praying, keep showing up, keep doing the next right thing whether or not you feel anything back this week.

Your move, brother. What's the one thing you'll keep doing today, whether or not you hear anything back?