[Spiritual direction} listens to the Silences between the spoken Sounds.”
— Eugene Peterson
Photo by Hannah Donze on Unsplash
It isn’t hard to find places of silence.
What is hard is finding the desire to be in those places.
We fill our lives with the sounds of man…noise that follows us all day. News, social media, music, chats. Sounds that speak to us of our own importance. Sounds that we hope provide answers. Sounds that mask our true fear.
We are fearful of the silences.
In the silences, doubts can now be heard. Words that were used to harm us, shame us, repeat themselves over and over in the silences. In the silences we play over and over again the failures of our lives. We despair.
So we drown our fears in sound.
But, it is in the silences that we also find God. He waits there because he is the answer to those doubts. He is the answer to those fears. He is the one who turns death into resurrected life.
He answers not with words, but with his presence—his presence in the silence with love, acceptance, approval, direction, comfort, patience.
We have to desire to be in the silences and listen. There we will find God.
