The God Who Cries Out

Isaiah 42:14–21; Colossians 1:9–14

For a long time I have held my peace, God says through Isaiah. I have kept still and restrained myself. Now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant. The image is stunning—and for many readers, shocking. God as a woman in labor. God gasping, panting, groaning with the pain of bringing something new into the world.

This is not the distant, serene God of philosophical theology. This is a God who suffers. A God who has been holding back, keeping still, restraining divine anguish—and who finally breaks open with a cry. Creation is not effortless for God. Redemption costs something.

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths." —Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Death: The Final Stage of Growth

Isaiah continues: I will lead the blind by a road they do not know, by paths they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. The birth-cry gives way to gentle leading. The same God who gasps in labor also takes the blind by the hand. Power and tenderness are not opposites in God. They are the same love, expressed differently.

Paul writes to the Colossians asking that they be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. He prays that they be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and be prepared to endure everything with patience. The word for patience here is makrothymia—long-suffering. Not grim endurance but expansive, wide-hearted perseverance.

God’s long silence followed by a birth-cry; the Colossians’ long-suffering empowered by God’s strength. There is a pattern here: the waiting is not empty. It is gestation. The silence is not absence. It is the pause before the cry, the darkness before the dawn, the labor before the birth.

Julian of Norwich, the great fourteenth-century mystic, received her revelations during a near-death illness. In the midst of extreme suffering, she saw the entire passion of Christ and heard the words: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. The promise came not despite the suffering but through it.

If you are in a season of divine silence—if God seems to have kept still too long, if the darkness shows no sign of lifting—consider that the silence may be labor. Something is being born. The cry is coming. And when it comes, it will lead you by paths you have not known, turning darkness into light.

The labor imagery for God challenges not only our theological assumptions but our spiritual ones. If God labors to bring forth the new creation, then our own struggles and birth-pains are not aberrations but participations. We are not merely passive recipients of redemption. We are, in Paul's language, co-laborers with God—sharing in the groaning of creation as it waits for liberation. The cries we utter in our own spiritual darkness may be echoes of the divine birth-cry, the sound of something new being born through us and within us.