The path when God seems far away is dark and hard. I don't know where I'm going, yet life carries me along. It is hard, uncomfortable, and frightening. Foster reminds me that we can't demand anything of God. Our relationship with him is one of mutual freedom. We are free to choose or ignore him as we will, and he is free to show himself to us, or not, as he wills. Of course, he never ignores us, for that is not in his nature. But he is not obliged to come when we ask him.
This is itself, a grace, says Foster, because God is "weaning us from fashioning him in our own image." Foster continues by recounting a season when he endured a time of God's seeming absence. He explins the lessons God was teaching him during this time. God freed him from being impressed by external things like successes and praise. He also indicates that he gained a deep awareness that he could not control God. Secondly, he indicates that he was freed from dependence upon interior results. I think this could partly be described like this: when stripped of the sense that we have prayed well, communed with God well, worshipped well, etc., and when our hearts are fraught with doubts of God's presence or goodness or even of his existence, we are left with nothing but pure faith in God. Everything else is stripped away and we must choose, again and again, it seems, to believe in God and who HE has said he is, rather than anything we have made of him.
It is a dangerous time, bscause we can easily sink into despair or abandon the search for God all together. It seems to me that these are the times when we must consciously recount God's work in our lives and the lives of others most carefully.
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