What echoes have you heard in the silence?
This is the question the Velvet Ashes’ Grove’s blog post begins with this week: pretty words dancing over a picture, to invite me into a still space, a sweet space with God again, like I had this weekend during a day-long retreat.
But I find myself resisting; I pour through the documents from the retreat; I find my mind running over thoughts and words and questions that still sit heavy on my heart. This week was a train wreck: a slow crashing, with the white noise of fatigue and sickness echoing much louder than His words.
I’ve been running again, and maybe it’s because I haven’t heard the promise-commands of God that are specific enough for me to grasp onto. Maybe it’s because I want more than His hand, more than His right hand to hold me: I want it to propel me into the next thing.
And deep, deep down inside, maybe this week just magnifies this lie I’ve been believing all my life: you are a failure. you haven’t gotten anything right. you are a failure.
I succumb to these lies more often than I overcome them. I listen and let them fill the silence that overwhelms me. I stop and stare and linger. And then, Elijah as my guide, I run. I take off.
And every time, every single time, God stoops under that broom tree with me and says, “Take and eat. Sleep.” He touches me—me! the one who says, “Take me instead.”
And he’s honest with me: “This journey is too much for you.”
But as he takes me forward, into more wilderness (I’m so tired of the wilderness), I find that the journey isn’t too much for him. And it never has been.
He’s shown me powerful signs of His presence over the past year & a half that I’ve spent overseas. But now, He’s settling me into the truest part of his presence, of himself: “the sound of a thin silence.”
It’s a place where words aren’t needed, because he is filling up the lack with himself.
It’s a place where silence can comfort, because we can actually listen to him (“What are you doing here, Katie?”)
It’s a place where the veil has been removed, the hidden things revealed, because we can stand in his presence, whole and blameless in Christ.
But my memory prods me, and hopefully you too, wherever you are:
Will we stand up & come back to the entrance and be willing to stand in the silence, again, still speak with him, and let him speak back when it’s time for us to hear the next words?
