One of my very favorite things in the world is silence.
Maybe that’s why I love camping so much, because it’s only me and the uninterrupted patterns of life continuing on in their own pace, unaffected by my presence. Clouds moving slowly along with the wind or a stream of water trickling softly as it weaves through its course; silence is kind to me.
It’s in these quiet places where I find peace. It’s here where I am able to reconnect parts of my soul that have become detached by the busyness of life and I can freely wander through my many thoughts, becoming lighter with every step and discovery.
It is in these sacred places where I feel safe enough to take a deep breath, and breathe life back into my body.
And it’s in the beauty of a still and silent place where I find God.
The last ten months I have realized that my soul needs silence to survive. It craves it and slowly starts to go crazy without it.
However, the environments I’ve found myself in lately have been anything but quiet.
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Month two of the race, and every other month, I have been challenged to find God in the chaos.
What a challenge.
I’ve lived in the bustling capital cities of Asian countries, where people are everywhere and moto’s honk at every person they pass. Our entire squad of forty some people have lived together for three months, our quarters are always very close and our beds are usually touching.
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In Romania, it was no different, and most of the squad all bunked up together in the missions house. It provided for a very fun atmosphere if you were extremely social and loved to talk a lot, which sometimes I did… sometimes. We had girl talk in the kitchen for hours, and picked lice out of each other’s hair for a few more hours, and if there wasn’t someone in the kitchen or outside, I could usually find someone to talk to in the bathroom all 35 of us shared.
Listening in the house there was always a sound echoing through the hallways, laughter and the strums of a guitar, or people gossiping about Olivia Pope and the latest episode of Scandal, pots clanked and jangled in the kitchen, doors opened and closed, phones buzzed, music played, and horse drawn carriages trotted rhythmically outside the window.
Sometimes the noise was a nice, reassuring sound reminding me of people I love, friendships and new family, but towards the end of the month the noise left the kitchen, swept through the hallways and entered my soul.
I wanted so badly to be able to find peace in the chaos, because after nine months of learning how to find the Lord in loud places, I should probably be really good at it, right?
Wrong.
I was really terrible at it, and in a desperate attempt to find my usual spirit of rest and peace, I took a much needed mental health day. When most of the squad went to ministry, I was left alone, and I just sat there on my mattress, on the ground, in the ridiculously dirty room I shared with six people, with my messy tears in one hand and a bag of skittles in the other.
I was able to pray and find the Lord in a comfortable place that I had been missing for so long.
And it’s so evident to me, that it is in times when I am alone and it is completely quiet, when I feel closest to the Lord. It’s in the silence where I connect the dots, learn, and God reveals himself to me. And that’s O.K.
I couldn’t find God in the chaos, so I did what I know how to do, and I looked for him in the silence.
A beautiful, quiet place to restore and listen to what actually needs to be heard.
It’d be a crazy awesome gift to be able to find peace in the chaos and through the noise. But that’s what it is underneath it all, a gift, not a skill to be learned. I can learn to see God in crazy places, find goodness in what’s uncomfortable and foreign to me, but in order to feel peace and restored in a noisy environment, it’s going to take a lot of prayer, not a lot of practice.
And I’m praying for it. But right now it’s in quiet car rides, and forests and the places of solitude that perfectly represent peace, where my spirit is taught how to breathe again and my soul is refreshed.
And in extraordinary circumstances, it’s a couple of hours sitting on a mattress, with bed bugs and a bag of skittles when I have the time and space to become the best version of myself again.
The space to simply be, is the beauty behind silence.
To be,
to breathe, and
to become.
