Feel the Silence

We had given up on trying to decide on something for dinner. Instead my sisters and I sat down to the television in the breakfast nook and proceeded to watch the last half of a rerun of an old sit-com we were otherwise unfamiliar with. We chuckled at the creative dialogue formed between a husband and wife who recently discovered they were to be first-time parents. However, as the show came to a close, the story line wrapped up with the devastating announcement from the key character: she had miscarried. Without any to-do, the scene faded and the show ended.

Faith, my sister, looked to up. “Hmm.” She said softly, talking mostly to herself. “I’m glad they didn’t end with music – you know, the show jingle they always play at the end. It was a sad scene and that’s okay. You don’t need the extra noise all the time. Sometimes you just need to feel the silence to understand...”

“What?” I questioned as much as myself as of her. I could feel my breath quicken and my brow furrow and my eyes blaze with a sudden desperation. “Finish your sentence. Understand what?”

“That was it. Just understand...” Faith said all too matter-of-factly.

She may have said something more. I don’t really know; I wasn’t paying attention. All I could hear was one phrase, one sentence, on arbitrary comment made by a sister who often speaks much truth but rarely speaks with the eloquence I was sure I just heard. “Sometimes you just need to feel the silence to understand...”

I couldn’t sit still. I was restless, longing and desperate. I felt crazed. For reasons I couldn’t understand, somehow I felt it was the answer and the question. Because in one breath and the rapid beating of my heart I simultaneously declared “That’s it!” and “What’s it?” It was all so simple and yet so complicated.

Let the voices fade. My voice, the voice of the world – the voice of everything except for the voice of God. I wanted a God shaped q-tip to come and fill my ears so that there was room for Him alone. With all of the other voices faded – if even for mere seconds at a time – I heard silence. And the silence irritated me, agitated me, discontented me. Before too much time would pass I would always stand in utter impatience. “God!” I would scream – my voice, the voice needing to fade more than any other – invading the stillness, “Say something already! I’m here! I’m waiting! I’m listening!” But so often no answer would come.

I took the silence at value and saw it for what I thought it was – nothing. Sometimes if I was quiet before God long enough He would answer me. Though often the answer was as dissatisfying as “wait,” there was a response. But silence, silence was something else all together – neither the answer nor the question but the dead space in between – nothing. And yet, and yet perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps it was both.

“Sometimes you just need to feel the silence to understand.” I have so often attempted to outlast the silence to hear the voice – the sure, gentle whisper, the knowing, the never audible but always genuinely the voice of God to receive the truth I longed and waited for. And in due time, God’s time...the answer, regardless of whether or not it was the one I had been hoping for, is mine to have. But never once have I stopped to consider the beauty of the silence. Never once can I remember trying to feel the silence. What does that even mean? What does that even look like?

My agitated discontent in seeking to understand with the lack of a voice, was it wrestling out the voice of silence? “Sometimes you just need to feel the silence to understand...” I considered for a moment that perhaps to hear and feel silence is not so much listening for the presence of something new – but listening for the exclusion of the other things. What does it feel like NOT to hear the other voices? Is THAT what it is like to feel the silence? When all of the other voices finally fade and all I hear is silence, am I finally hearing truth? What is there to understand in the stillness and solitude of the presence of God? And to what end does it lead to a point where I might understand...

Blessed Curse

It’s the blessed curse. I can’t decide if it is one or the other and so have come to the conclusion that it must be both. I am writing – constantly. And constantly I am finding connections and lessons to God in the smallest of ways...through the single word of a song and the unsuspecting and fleeting comment of a friend or the gentle whispers of the beauty surrounding me. Everything I stop to think about for even a second becomes a word, a paragraph, a meaning.

And I despise it. I feel like I am constantly over analyzing every piece of my world. Can I not just see an aloe plant for an aloe plant with not also having to consider – very personally – the difference between surviving and thriving? Or tonight, I was getting ready for bed when my routine landed me with toothpaste in my eye. Never before have I encountered this phenomenon – especially with my glasses still on - nor can I explain exactly how it happened. But the moment my eye began to burn with searing pain – my mind went instantly from “my eye hurts” to “what connection can be made, what truth told, in the telling of this story?” Everything is a story.

And I love it. Despite my irritation, I love the stories. I love the connections I’ve found. The days where God feels the farthest away lately are the days without stories. I love having been taken to a place where I think little of the analyzing I do before I find myself wrapped in the ponderings which bring me closer to my Saviour. I love being able to see God in the little things – and recognize an ability to see Him in things that otherwise have no immediate correlation. For He exists even in those things as well. Oh what a blessed curse.

Write

Write. One of my very first ventures on this, the blog I have yet to tell well, anyone, exists questioned me. The innocent question of a little girl left me swirling for answers I could only struggle with myself and beg of God. “Miss Anika,” she had said, “what is your favorite thing to do; the thing you just want to do all of the time?” I was struck by how few options I felt like were even there for me to stop and consider – and all of them came up short. And the question only continued to feed into the battle I was already waging – the battle in which I sought to find exactly who I was...as I was in a desperate search for me.

I have not come much farther in my search. The revealings I have are small and point to things I cannot understand. Peculiarly I am being brought through yet another process – different from the last in many ways including the fact that I see the process running and working in front of me. I recognize each stage as it occurs – as if naturally stating where I now am based on what God has chosen to reveal to me. And still, as of yet, the process has not led me to the end – nor can I imagine, though I am able to recognize the process, where it may lead.

But this I do know...as I seek to understand this process, this new set of developments, all I want to do is write. All of the time...I just want to write. Even when I don’t want to write, this aching, this yearning pulls me to think, to ponder, to process...until every word meets the page. I write to feel. I write to understand. I write to connect and to feel connected. I wish I were a better writer – more eloquent, more linguistically savvy, more profound. But I can only write the way I know and the way that comes so naturally from my fingers on the keys. And perhaps my inability is alright – for perhaps any better and I would be proud or the world would take note. And perhaps the writings, though sometimes containing truth too good to keep to myself, are meant, for the time, for me alone. Write. So many times I sit down and all I want to do is write...

Still, however, I don’t think writing is my answer. I don’t think writing is what I was supposed to discover – but maybe it is supposed to be the means in which I am to go discovering. Discovering what it means to be me...to find me...to find myself caught in the epicenter.