Devotionals

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In Quietness


… work in quietness …
(2 Thess. 3:12)

There is something about the Oldies we love, we long for, at least I do. We have a hunger for earlier days, when life was gentler, less frantic. When people had time … for reflection … for one another. Today every moment of our lives fill, even our sleeping moments, with sound, with busyness. And it makes me hungry for what once was.

Reading Paul’s admonition in 2. Thess. 3:12 reawakens that hunger.

… work in quietness …

We’re not a contemplative people any more. Have you noticed? Even when we try, finding a truly quiet space, for any significant length of time, proves challenging, if not impossible.

But it is in quietness we hear God’s voice. It is in quietness God’s words take root, digging deep into the soil of our heart. Quietness, that fertile sod in which the hands of God work the seeds of His truth deep into our life, reaping a harvest that glorifies Him.

And the need for quietness continues to stir a deep, deep hunger within me, a hunger to find it in my own life.

A few years back, my son and I left early one morning to go cut wood on a friend’s ranch. We’d never done anything like that before and didn’t know what to expect. What I didn’t anticipate was finding God at every turn. In the rustling grass, in the wind that never stopped breathing, in the sun’s gentle kiss, and most of all in the silence of my heart that drank in every drop and knew refreshment untasted before that stolen moment in time.

Hour upon hour we were drenched in silence, speaking little, but hearing so much, with every part of our being. Lessons were being taught in every unspoken word, and we learned, how we learned as God dripped into every crack and crevice of the day.

The psalmist knew. His words echoed and re-echoed in my heart all throughout that autumn day. They reverberate there still.

Be still and know that I am God.

I’m not a good conversationalist, and I know it. My thoughts race ahead of the words falling from another’s lips, and leave me perpetually guilty of unlimited interruptions into another’s efforts to communicate. Be quick to listen and slow to speak hasn’t yet effectively tapped its root deep into my nature and quieted my heart.

The frenetic nature of our world, at least my world, perpetuates that thoughtless quality of my spirit, stripping away peace, layer by layer.

How contrary to what I hear the psalmist, to what I hear Paul, calling me to: stillness, quietness, a listening … to that gentle voice of God, ever surrounding me, yet drowned out in the noisiness of living today.

Yesteryear may not come again. It may have belonged to a people of another day. But its heart still needs to beat within my own. So I listen, now, to the quiet whisper, the gentle nudge of a voice calling me. Calling me to walk with Him in quietness, a quietness in which He can sow His word and work it deep within the soil of my soul.



© 20 October 2005
DeAnna Brooks

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