Q - Quiet

                          “In quietness and trust is your strength” Isaiah 30:15

I am learning to appreciate the value of quiet. Chaos swirls around me most days with a toddler, a preteen and a big pup in our home. I know that one day I will miss the noise and craziness. But it also makes me treasure the quiet times. Early morning when one’s at school and the other is sleeping. Late evenings when everyone else is in bed. Our culture likes noise; we’re surrounded by it. It’s like we’re afraid to be silent, to be still, to be alone with our thoughts. When I walk our dog sometimes at night, I see televisions glowing in most of the homes.

Even when we can silence our surroundings, it can still be tough to quiet our minds. Last year our church had a day-long retreat. One of the exercises involved being silent in order to hear from God. We had to simply sit in silence for fifteen or twenty minutes and try to quiet our minds and listen. Most of us found it hard to stop our thoughts from racing. 

Why is it so hard to just be quiet? For me, at least, I think it’s partly because I am constantly trying to figure things out or to control things in my world. Or maybe we feel like our worth lies in doing enough, in accomplishment. We don’t want one minute of downtime. That would be wasted time. But is it?

Quiet can restore us; it can calm us. It enables us to tackle our busy life with renewed vigor. And as the verse says, that’s where our strength is. That’s where God speaks to us. In the quiet. In the stillness. Deep within our hearts. Could it be that that’s what we are afraid of? Is that what we run from?