I'm becoming a champion of silence. If you know me well enough, you'll know this is almost unheard of. Ask any of my long-suffering friends and they'll tell you, that while I may be known as quiet, I cannot deal with complete silence, if I'm writing or reading, there is always music or other sounds playing, when I walk, I'm never silent, I'm having a long and deep discussion with God, or with myself in my head. I don't do silence.
This might be my undoing when I can't sit in lulls of conversation and have to keep talking because there are always a million thoughts racing around my head.
And yet, in the past few months, when I've only really had me myself and I, I have become a champion of silence.
Because I seem to have found that in the silence, is when I've started to hear God the loudest.
About a week into lockdown I tried the silence thing for the first time it was getting dark and I was praying by a candle on my window sill, and usually, when I pray, I put music on in the background, or I'm walking around so there's plenty of background noise. But this time, I thought no, I'll sit and after I've prayed, I'll just pause and listen, and see if what people have been telling me about quieting myself before God was true.
I know I've had deep spirit-filled experiences when the worship music was blasting and I was surrounded by worshippers, I'm a crier and have found myself overcome with God's presence a lot, hence I was pretty sceptical about the feeling being replicated in silence.
So I closed my eyes with the light of my candle flickered a sort of orange presence behind my closed eyes, and for the first few minutes, all I could hear was my own head. Lists of things I needed to do, various tangents I fell down in my head about random things that popped up as I was trying to clear my mind and so it went on like that for a while. Then, without even realising it, I began to get something different swirling around my head. They weren't worries, or random trains of thought, they were particularly loud and persistent images, I stayed stilled like that for a good while, allowing these words to wash over me, in awe of the fact I was actually experiencing God's spirit in such a profound but seemingly, from the outside, silent way.
After I felt I could finish my prayer and move on, frantically ran to scribble these words down, no idea what God was trying to say to me through them.
Going back to them a few days ago, and looking back and the months that have gone by, I realised that some of the things God was telling me, ended up happening, I just needed to open my eyes to the silence to really see.
Before lockdown I was Ms.Busy. constantly running between school and church and family, everything was in perfect balance, and I was happy, but I didn't have time for quiet, I didn't have time, for being still and knowing God that intimately.
With the world sort of on pause, I had time to pause, and the weeks of gone my personal relationship with God has strengthened so much, not only because of the moments where everything has felt overwhelming, but also because I've been able to relish the silence. To live and breathe in the silence. I also have to admit that God gave me a bit of a telling off in the silence, let me know the ways I wasn't loving my brother's and sister's in Christ enough. But as the loving father he is, it felt good to hear these messages from him, I wasn't scared, I was just peaceful.
So, I'm now a champion of silence, and yes I still walk with worship songs turned loud, but I give myself time during the week to sit by a candle in silence, and to walk without music and just listen to God speaking through the birds and trees - it's amazing how little one has to do to feel the spirit of God. I think the biggest lesson I've learnt is that there is so much God in silence, so much of his spirit breathing through just being still.
He doesn't need us busy, he doesn't need us rushing around, he needs the quiet sometimes, God exists in the waiting, in the moments in-between, in times where it’s just us, our hearts and Him, whispering to each other, as close as they were always meant to be.
