“For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him
comes my salvation.”
—Psalm 62:1
Can silence really be a good thing?
My days are often anything but silent. I pray and within seconds my mind wanders aimlessly. Silence feels frustrating, especially when it battles against time I don’t have. Lately, days are one chaotic sprint after another. Responsibilities are endless. There are places to go, people to see, needs that need met. All that running, all that spinning, leaves me weary. My sprint becomes a stagger through fumes. In the morning I wake tired and in the evening crash—utterly spent. All that running doesn’t help productivity, quite the opposite actually. Instead, all I want is for everything to stop. As my energy wanes, so does my creativity. Even simple tasks feel heavy. I am left wanting. Left longing for something more, something simple, something far from the chaos. I long for silence.
Maybe in this season you feel the same.
We are not told, but I wonder what things moved the psalmist as he wrote (v.2)? What things had shaken his world and prompted him to turn pen and heart to God? Whatever pressed upon him externally, the psalmist understood the importance of practicing silence before the Lord. In the original Hebrew text, the opening line of Psalm 62 reads, “only to God is my soul silence.” To the psalmist, the presence of God awed him into such rest, such peace, that all else was quieted. C.H. Spurgeon wrote;
“It is an eminent work of grace to bring down the will and subdue the affections to such a degree, that the whole mind lies before the Lord like the sea beneath the wind, ready to be moved by every breath of his mouth, but free from all the inward and self caused emotion, as also from all the power to be moved by anything other than the divine will.”
I’m moved by a lot of things other than God’s divine will.
Just this week I ran angry on the treadmill after feeling disappointed by things I couldn’t control. I lacked patience with my children. I was short with my husband. I cried as I remembered the anniversary of my dad passing eight years ago. So many outside circumstances move and shape me everyday. Rather than letting external pressures move me, it is far better to be clay in God’s hands. In God I am kept. In God is salvation. God is my rock. All else is sinking sand. Yet how many times have I bent or been bent by outside circumstances? How many times have I succumbed to pressures of my own doing? Life is full of distraction. Busyness runs the chaotic camp that cultivates my inability to rest. My foster dad used to say that if Satan couldn’t make me sin, he would make me busy. Running 100 mph, seven days a week, leaves little room for reflection, let alone room for awe. The world’s advice is to keep putting one foot in front of the other—to keep doing. While this advice is good, it’s incomplete. There are times when it’s necessary to stop.
Sometimes we need to just be.
Silence doesn’t feel good. Silence is too intrusive, too self exposing, too difficult. Awkward. So we run. Busyness distracts from all kinds of griefs, but it doesn’t mend them. We run to anyone and anything instead of the very hands that hold the power to not only save and keep us, but restore us. Silence before God is not our natural response, but it reflects faith and trust in the power of God at work within us. What I have learned as I have quieted myself before the Lord is that there is a vast richness found only in the presence of God. The heartache and pain of circumstances may persist, but God is present in them. In the waiting, in the silence, God is near. The psalmist declared that, “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).
Silence isn’t just good, it’s necessary.
Silence before the Lord is life for our soul. It restores—not just physically, but emotionally and intellectually as well. All our heart, our mind, our very being is kept in God’s hands. What a beautiful thing to be awed to rest in the hands of the one that holds us together.
As C.H. Spurgeon so eloquently stated,
“Faith can hear the footsteps of coming salvation, because she has learned to be silent.”
O Lord, teach me silence. Help me trust you. Renew my hope today. May you be my all and everything. In the here and now, teach me to wait well.
