stillness

"Life is busy and noisy -- and it allows us to forget things too difficult to think about. But there is something about a still night...
Sometimes, when the girl walked from one building to another on such a night, she would pause, and take it in. But she would soon hurry on again, slipping into the light and noise of the buildings before her fears could quite get a hold of her. 
But tonight she didn't run. She slowly sat down in the darkness, as the stillness seeped into her very being. As the hustle and bustle subsided, everything came to the surface. 
The weight and depth of her thoughts and emotions were overwhelming. 
The bittersweet memories. The gentle nostalgia. The deep longing. The dull grief. The warm joy. The cold fear. 
She closed her eyes. She wanted to flee back to the blissful oblivion of noise. But she stayed. The night didn't cause these things; it simply exposed them. She couldn't avoid them forever. 
Slowly, she confronted all these hidden things, one by one. The thoughts, the memories, the emotions. She forced herself to admit the existence of things she wanted to ignore. 
That bitterness remained. That grief, shoved aside, still festered and ached in some forgotten corner. That desire was as strong as it had ever been..."

I've heard it said that the early church fathers believed every strong Christian had to spend time in the desert. I don't think it was really the physical desert itself that made them stronger -- the heat and sand, the caves and camels.
I think it was the silence.
Silence is a beam that pierces to the darkest corners of the heart. Silence is a knife that carves away the concealing fronts the mind constructs. Silence is a hand that rips away the veil that covered the blistering turmoil within the soul.
It is in the silence that we can hear a still, small whisper.
If we find ourselves feeling alone, perhaps what God is really trying to do is make us be silent for a time. Sometimes, silence is what is truly needed.

"We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship."
- CS Lewis

"Be still and know that I am God." 
- Psalm 46