Listening in the Silence

Most visitors to the farm which provides home comment about the quiet.  It is a place gifted with quietness.  I am grateful to be able to walk in it, be immersed in it, and to hear what it teaches me.  When I leave here for more urban confines, I feel like the young boy who walked into a noisy restaurant with ear coverings.  Away from here I struggle with the sounds and sights that overload my senses.  What most people do not hear in the quiet silence of a place like the farm are its voices.  The silence has its own sounds.   

The first voice that speaks in the silence is the one which speaks about the absence of the accustomed noises and sounds.  It is always amazing how what is not present can speak so loudly.  One thing required to hear the voices in the silence is time.  There must be a willingness to sit silently in the silence in order to hear what it is saying.  To hear in the silence, it is necessary to allow the silence to come to us.  Straining to hear is of no avail.  Its voice is heard in the waiting for it to come to us.  Actually, what can be heard in the silence is not so much about "what" but "Who."  God is the One who lingers in the quietness, but it is a mistake to think that He lingers only in the external silence.  

It is an easy thing to shut down the noise makers around us; however, it is another thing to shut down the noise that comes from within.  Being immersed in the silence teaches us that we cannot hear it speaking if our minds and hearts are cluttered with the regrets of yesterday, the preoccupations of today, or the worries about tomorrow.  The real silence to be known is not out there, but in the heart where God dwells and from which He seeks to speak with a voice that is as soft and as powerful as the Wind.