Getting Quiet
Today is Good Friday. I want to get quiet. Turn off the “noise” for the weekend. Continue to watch The Chosen TV series with my family. Pack for our camping trip. We leave on Sunday to head to Hunting Island State Park for a few days of fun and adventure. It’s been a while since we camped, and the weather will be perfect.
I am going to quiet myself online next week because it is our Spring Break. We will camp, celebrate a son’s 18th birthday, and reboot the house by the weekend. I decided not to write next week, but to pick up again on Monday, April 12th.
Speaking of quiet, I love these words that I received in Sarah Clarkson’s newsletter today:
“The only reason I seek quiet is because I have deep faith that I worship a God who speaks in miraculous love, daily, in the inmost rooms of my being, and the voice I want to hear is his.
I thought, for a bit, that I was trying to solve a modern ill by writing about quiet, but today I was reminded that what I’m really writing about is love: rooting us, holding us, whispering in our hearts, companioning our every moment. To choose quiet over the cacophony of other voices is simply to enact my belief in the radical generosity of God’s presence, with me, here, each minute, inviting me to rest, to watch, to wonder, to laugh, to adore. Such quiet may lead to all sorts of music and speech and action, but the root of those things will be love, witnessed and received.”
Is that a beautiful thought? We don’t simply seek quiet for quiet’s sake. Quiet is an arrow pointing us to Love. When our minds and hearts and environment still, we can hear and sense God, His invitations, and His companionship. Ultimately, quiet can move us to outward action, but from a place of rootedness in Love.
I look forward to tasting and seeing that the Lord is good next week as I walk along the coast, listen to the breezes in my tent, observe the conviviality of fellow campers, savor the hot cup of tea around a fire, feel the warmth of the down-filled sleeping bag. He is everywhere, near and dear. Quiet is the path to noticing Him.
I hope your Easter weekend gives you hope. That the recognition of the power of death being overcome will fill you with peace, and that the power of the resurrection will remind you that the dead spaces in your life can be transformed. May you find some quiet during Eastertide to connect with Jesus in fresh, enlivening ways.
Peace be with you,
Aimee