Lenten Words | Quiet

It's difficult, isn't it, to be quiet?

We are a people of noise, busyness, and constant motion. It seems to be the default mode of the human race. Fidgeting...antsy almost, if there is any awkward break in the action.

But is there value to be found in the spaces that quiet brings? Come visit a few with me in your mind today...

On the top of a mountain, newly minted with a crisp blanket of white and the world in all its sparkling grandeur sleeping below... Your hard-earned tracks, and those of a local woodland deer are the only signs that life has discovered this sacred perch from which you feebly try to absorb a landscape akin to perfection. Time and sound alike suspended in the stillness that only fresh snowfall can bring.

Standing on the edge of a cliff so high that you can barely even hear the crashing waves you know are undulating far below. Wind sweeping hair and scarf so violently it's a battle to stay on your feet as it steals both your balance and your breath. Yet somehow, this violence has its own special quality of silence.

Hiking miles to the middle of a field...in the middle of a moonless night. Darkness so palpably thick it presses on the edges of the soft halo cast by your lantern. Until, stopping, you extinguish your light and the stars creep in to take its place as a gentle glow brings the field around you slowly into view. Seeming to brighten with every moment, you imagine a great dimmer turning up the stars in the Milky Way. And you can almost SEE the silence...

In all three of these situations: silence so stunning, so resounding.

It's like you can simultaneously hear nothing...and everything at once.

Your heart beats, and as you both feel and hear it's rhythm (typically hidden beneath the soundtrack of daily living), you hear more... Your thoughts, emotions... your deepest hidden places react to this breathing room in (perhaps?) an overwhelming way. Unaccustomed to such stillness and the opportunity to feel, experience, and process big things. 

Things larger than the pace of everyday life allows. We find ourselves stretched, changed. 

Different.

Maybe, it's in the quiet that we truly find ourselves. And find Him.