My Silence

My soul waits in silence for God only; from Him is my salvation.
                                                                                                            Psalms 62:1

If you have not noticed, I have imposed silence on myself for the last three months.   I am afraid that my words were hindering my healing and ability to hear God.  For me, words can distract from experience.  What I mean is that there is a difference between experiencing something (love, joy, pain or sorrow) and talking about it.  To find the right words to describe an experience, a person has to analyze the experience.  That makes her/him an observer rather than participant.  Sometimes when I blog, my words gushed out unfiltered pain, loss, confusions and sadness with little attempt to understand or interpret.  But, at other times blogging pulled me out of the terror or sadness I was experiencing.  It didn’t only happen when I blogged.  My conversations with friends and strangers became shallow, trite and dishonest.  I used my words, spoken or written, to construct a new world for myself; avoiding the one I lived in.  As I looked back on some of my posts, I cringe at my bold declarations about the future and arrogant claims that I understood what was happening to me.  I began to believe that I was an expert on pastoral suffering, but I was and still am simply a broken pastor.

I had also slipped into a dependency on you who read my ramblings.  I desperately wanted someone to understand and sympathize.  In my broken heart, I came to believe this was the only way the pain would go away.  If someone commented, I didn’t hurt as much.  If no one commented or visited the blog, my pain darkened into depression.  This was unfair and unreasonable and in my expectations of others, I hid from God and avoided facing my pain.  Still, I appreciate the kind words and knowing that I have fellow travelers on this journey; however, I needed, for a time at least, to find a place of solitude where I would bring myself face to face with my God.

For the past three months, Sharon and I have been on the road two to three weeks out of the month.  We are finished traveling and now turn to consider our future.  We do not regret or feel guilty about the traveling.  It has provided a much needed rest.  I feel like Elijah after the confrontation on Mount Carmel.  I have needed to sleep and eat angel bread for a season.  The rest has been good, but the travel has also been distractive: lack of routine, fun things to do and good friends to reconnect with has taken up most of our time and made it hard to spend extended time with God.  Now we are home, but the new routine does not include the delight of pastoral ministry.  Each morning I awake to a blank day.  I know, I know, why am I complaining?  Don’t most people dream of a responsibility-free life?  I miss going to the office, meeting and counseling people, planning meetings—the sense of Kingdom purpose for my day.  We are busy, but lacking the structure and definition of a job in ministry, I am a little aimless and easily drift into sadness. 

Henri Nouwen challenges his readers to not run from or suppress their pain, but rather, bring it into the presence of God who loves us whether we sense it or not.  For him, the tools use to accomplish this are silence, solitude and waiting.  They sound so spiritual… peaceful…, but just try sitting for 10 minutes waiting for God to show up.  My mind explodes with voices while God seems quiet and absent.  The pain I so want to escape grips my heart.  My ADD is ready to bolt after 20 seconds.  The accusing voices form a ridiculing choir mocks me for thinking that God would show up, or that He even could love me.  Exhausted with waiting, I fall asleep only to awake to the accusers, “You couldn’t even wait for 5 minutes?”

Sounds hopeless… pathetic… depressing?  I guess it could, but it has been the path I have needed to take.  I have stayed in silence and continued to practice solitude.  It doesn’t look pretty or very spiritual, but I am honest in my fumbling before my God and I am staying put, pain and all.  There’s no glow around me, nor have I become a spiritual giant.  In fact, I have become smaller, weaker and simpler – and I am okay with that.  I am at peace in the presence of my God with all the stuff I have hidden, denied, avoided and run from.  I am not far past the point of simply being here, however, I am not troubled as much or as long by my accusing voices.  I have even heard a faint whisper, “I really do love you… son.”