Well Done, My Child

The first time I remember appreciating silence was the summer after my freshman year of college. I worked as a camp counselor that summer and filled my weeks with the sounds of 12 elementary-aged girls in my cabin and hundreds of other girls around the camp. While I enjoyed my work as camp counselor (it actually took root and transformed my life), I also distinctly remember walking back to my cabin in the hours after campers left and taking in the beautifully sweet sound of silence. It was outdoor silence, so it was punctuated with birds singing, leaves rusting, and squirrels running. But it was beautiful. And in its echoes, I could hear the sounds of little girls laughing and praising God, and that made the silence even more beautiful.

Still, I struggled with silence. It made me uncomfortable. 15 seconds of silence felt like an eternity. I couldn’t understand how my parents could ride in silence for an hour or more at a time. I assumed it meant they were mad. It didn’t. It just meant that they were comfortable in their silence.

The other day, I heard someone say: “Only speak if your words can add to the silence.”

I also read the chapter on solitude in Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline. Foster highlighted the fact that too often we fill time with anxious words of explanation. We want people to like us. We want to be understood. We don’t want anyone to upset. We don’t want to be thought ignorant. So we talk. And we try hard to win the affection and accolades of those around us when sometimes less is more—when sometimes our yes really does need to be yes and our no just needs to be no—when sometimes we need to release control of what others think of us and allow our spirits and intentions to speak for themselves.

This is something that I am learning.

This is something that is growing my faith.

When we slow down and let life catch up with us, we are often bombarded by thoughts, words, deeds, actions, guilts, desires, hopes, dreams, and everything in between. When we open ourselves to silence, we are often overwhelmed by the noise that fills our heads. It’s in the those moments that we are tempted to return to outer noise—music, white noise, television, conversation, constant activity—because it feels normal and numbs our soul.

But if we just wait? What if we push through those initial moments of inner chaos and let the silence surround us? What if we allow our thoughts to pass through our minds with grace rather than giving them permission to play like a broken record? What if we breathe in “Jesus Christ, Prince of Peace” and breathe out “Come sit with me now,” and let our breath hold us on a sacred pillow of silence?

Our souls find rest.

God calls God’s people to be different. God calls us to be set-apart. Counter-cultural. Light in darkness and salt where there is no flavor. Maybe what this means isn’t so much that we are to take a stand on issues of morality and create for ourselves a narrow-minded, hateful reputation. Maybe what this means is that we are to be a people of silence. A people who, at our cores, are at peace with God and ourselves and do not need the constant motion and noise of this world to fill the gaping hole that is Needy Beast.

I’m on a journey toward embracing silence, toward allowing my soul to find rest.

I pray that you will join me and that together we will hear echoes of God laughing and saying, “Well done, my child. Well done.”