Often, I read first thing in the morning from an old fashioned devotional book by Oswald Chambers, Utmost For His Highest. Usually, I’m on my second cup of tea after I’ve sat in silence for awhile.
Somedays, his words make me think and other days, not so much. My forty-year-old leather-bound copy is worn, tattered, and full of margin notes and must-have-colored-ink underlines. These scribbles and undelines are like reading a journal documenting seasons of peace and anguish, epiphanies and prejudices, thanksgivings and complaints. Often, these notations are excruciatingly personal, accompanied by obvious silent answers to prayer.
It’s like working in the garden after a storm. I start out eager with a mental list of to do’s, yet as the morning progresses, my pace is hampered by the build-up of mud and garden detritus caked to the bottom of my clogs. I stop and scrape it off, but the build-up keeps re-accumulating and my plans are postponed to another day.
In my early dawn readings this morning, I came across a passage that I had not previously underlined and for which I had not made any margin comments. Obviously, It hadn’t spoken to me before. The passage asked, “Has God trusted you with His silence? Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response? When you cannot hear God, you will find that He has trusted you in the most intimate way possible – with absolute silence.”
That’s NOT what I wanted to hear!
Are we able to sit in our personal, intimate silence, postponing our well laid out plans and requests for another day?
Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.