Lent XV

Living in the country has introduced me to a new kind of silence.  Being about a half mile from the nearest paved road means a lot of the noise I have grown accustomed over a lifetime is no more.  It also means I am hearing things I have never before heard.  I have learned to hear the sounds of a whining baby goose frantically flying through the air behind its Momma.  I have heard the sound of bird wings flapping in the air above my heard.  And did you know that grazing cows make a pulling noise as the grass gets wrapped around their tongues on its journey to one of its four stomachs?   When it gets quiet enough and you allow yourself to become a part of the quietness, it is amazing the things which can be heard.

 

The Word tells us to be still so that we can know and experience God.  When we pray we can enter into that still quietness where the voice of God can be known.  The problem for most of us is creating the quietness.  Our lives are normally filled with so much noise clutter that hearing anything above it is all but impossible.  It can be an interesting thing to sit in a place and choose to reduce the noise that can be eliminated until there is finally nothing but the quiet.  As we do this in our praying and as we allow ourselves to become immersed in that quietness, there are spiritual blessings of presence to know that most of us would have regarded as impossible.

 

One of the hardest things we do in our praying is to learn to experience the silence where the voice of God is so often heard.  Maybe we really are afraid of it.  Maybe we are addicted to the noise.  Maybe we might actually hear a Word which will require us to act.  Whatever it is, we want to run from the silence and when we do, we are running from the blessing of being in the presence of this God who has such a deep desire for us to know intimate communion with Him.