Do you like silence or do you find it a bit scary?
I was reading an article about St Augustine and his writings - ‘Confessions’.
In one chapter he writes of a conversation with his mother, where they imagine everything falling completely quiet with nothing moving in order that God can speak to them directly.
Maybe that is a picture of what happened early on in the coronavirus pandemic. It’s hard to remember now but the world was a quieter place. A ceasing of the background drone of traffic, of factory noise, of loud conversation on the streets. I remember hearing bird song that had been previously drowned out by noise.
We fill our lives with activity, indeed we are made to feel guilty if we are not busy doing something. The problem is that in the midst of all this activity and noise we don’t have time to stop and listen to God, to hear what he is asking of us.
Lent is traditionally a season of the year where we pause, reflect and listen, but do we want to?
In Psalm 62 the psalmist tells himself “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from Him”.
Intentional silence is a chance for us to turn off the television, close our laptops, and put our phones far away from us so that we can, like the psalmist, deliberately hear from and hope in our God and in his word.
Rejoice in the silence, take hold of the times in the day where you are not ‘doing’, to wait upon God to listen to Him. Take note of what he is saying!