A headline came across my screen this week that I have not been able to shake: We Need the Church to Face the Quiet. I did not need to read a word underneath it. The title alone had already found me out.
Because here is the truth about most of us, and I include myself: we have gotten very good at never being alone with our own thoughts. There is a podcast for the drive to Muskegon. There is a screen for the ten minutes in the waiting room. The television goes on when we walk into the house, not because anyone is watching it, but because the silence felt like it was asking something of us. We have built lives with no gaps in them, and then we wonder why God seems to have gone quiet.
What the quiet is actually asking
Noise is not evil. I am not going to tell you to throw out your phone or sit cross-legged in a dark room for an hour. But I do want to name why we run from stillness, because I do not think it is really about boredom.
The quiet is where the tiredness shows. It is where the thing we have been outrunning catches up. It is where you finally hear the question you have been talking over for weeks — am I okay? is this working? why am I so angry at everything? As long as there is sound, we can postpone that conversation. Stillness hands us the bill.
And that is exactly why Scripture keeps walking us toward it rather than away from it. Listen to the honesty of Psalm 131: "LORD, my heart is not proud; my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content." (Psalm 131:1-2)
Notice he does not say the quiet came over him like weather. He says, I have calmed and quieted myself. It took effort. It took deciding that he was not going to carry matters too big for him today. The picture he reaches for is a child who has stopped grabbing — not a child who has stopped loving the mother, but one who has stopped needing something from her every second and is simply content to be held. That is a staggering image of what rest with God can look like.
Jesus went looking for it
Mark tells us that in the busiest stretch of Jesus' ministry, with a whole town at the door, "Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed" (Mark 1:35). The Son of God, with more legitimate demands on His time than you or I will ever have, got up before anybody could need Him and went where it was quiet.
Now, I pastor a church that is not shy about volume. We lift our hands. We sing loud. Psalm 150 tells us to praise Him with cymbals, and I have no interest in apologizing for that. But I notice something about the way God speaks. Elijah stood through wind and earthquake and fire, and then came "a gentle whisper" (1 Kings 19:12) — and that was where God was. The Holy Spirit is perfectly able to speak over a drum kit. He does it all the time. But He is not a shouter, and a life with no quiet in it is a life where His voice has a lot of competition.
What I see right now, in people I walk alongside, is this: when someone finally gives God fifteen unhurried minutes, something settles. Not fireworks, usually. A scripture they had forgotten surfaces. A name comes to mind and they call that person. A grudge loosens. That is the Spirit working in real time — gentle, specific, present.
If the silence has felt empty
Let me say this plainly, because somebody needs it. If you have sat in the quiet and heard nothing, you have not failed, and God is not withholding Himself from you. Presence and the feeling of presence are two different things. The weaned child in Psalm 131 is not analyzing anything. He is just being held. Some days that is all the prayer there is, and it is enough.
If you want some company in it, come to Prayer on Tuesday, October 13 at 11am. We will pray out loud, and we will also leave room where nobody is talking — and you may find that the unhurried part is where God gets a word in.
Turn something off today. Ten minutes. Let the quiet ask its question, and then let Christ answer it, because He always answers it the same way: come to me, and I will give you rest. He is not hiding from you. He is waiting for a gap.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.