Even The Silence Cries Out

I’ve learned some things from silence. I’ve been indulging in it lately.

The TV remains off, the music will play occasionally, but silence has been a mainstay these days. You know..the kind of silence where the only sound that can interrupt your thoughts is the electricity pulsing through the refrigerator in the kitchen. Or a 747 cutting through the clouds as it approaches one of the neighboring airports.

But you can hear some really fascinating things as well. The silence allows you to hear the other silent things, like your heartbeat, or even the sound your throat makes when you routinely swallow absolutely nothing at all. I can almost hear myself blink.

And it all feels rather comfortable.

Silence hasn’t always been comfortable for me. My past thoughts were too loud, too menacing, too overwhelmingly dark. In that silence, I felt alone, abandoned, and virtually destroyed.

But silence can equal peace.

And these days, it does. In this silence, I think about how God changed silence for me, from a dark, fearful experience, to moments of grateful worship. In the quiet moments, I seem to travel through time as I assess how the grace of God has played out in my history. He is evident in every quiet moment. And hindsight has taught me that God was present when He most seemed painfully silent.

In silent darkness, a seed germinates and eventually transforms into a plant.

In the silence of the night, the universe splashes billions of stars and galaxies across the skies, twinkling like diamonds against black velvet, declaring the glory of the Unseen Creator.

So much is being said in the silence of every night.

In what feels like God’s silence in human trouble, when loss is profound and countless tears still have not scraped the surface in expressing our grief, God’s children are being transformed. Even this is fruitful silence…

In the quiet of tonight, I’m listening to God speak. His voice is in every silent thing. His voice is in the scriptures that come to remembrance. He comforts me through the kitten purring outside my window. He is proclaiming His sustaining grace in the steady beating of my heart. And His glory is on the rims of my fingerprints, as I observe them and am reminded that no one on earth has the same ones as I do.  Even the electricity humming through the refrigerator, yet again, reminds me of His sustenance and constant provision.

Thank you, Lord, for you are in the silence. You are my Selah…