Be Still and Know (What You’ve Been Avoiding)

A few months back I was on a work trip and decided I was finally going to try sitting in silence. No phone, no music, no SportsCenter AM. I’d heard people I respect talk about it for years, and I figured how hard could it be.

I made it eight minutes.

Something Is Always On

The whole time I felt like a serial killer sitting alone in his hotel room, and I hated every one of those eight minutes. I didn’t try it again. It kept nagging at me though, mostly because once I started paying attention I realized I’m never in silence. Ever.

If I’m walking somewhere I’ve got music in. If I’m home the TV is on, and I'm typically on work calls for most of my weekdays. And if none of that is available, I’m probably talking. I honestly couldn’t tell you the last time there was just nothing.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a good playlist, and some of my favorite moments with God have happened with a song turned all the way up. I’m not about to tell anybody to throw their AirPods in a lake. But I’ve started to wonder if I was keeping it on for a reason, and if that reason had less to do with liking the noise and more to do with what it was keeping out.

•••

A Bench by the Lake

At the end of September I went to Sky Ranch as a chaperone with my daughter Ellie. I was a real pain about it. Grumpy for weeks leading up to it, didn’t want to go, and if you’d asked me why I couldn’t have told you. I just knew I was dreading it, and I made sure everybody around me knew it too.

One morning I woke up early and walked to get coffee with my headphones in like always. On the way back to the cabin I passed a bench by the lake, and I don’t know if it was the Holy Spirit or what, but I sat down and took my headphones out. For only the second time in my life, I decided to sit in the silence of the early morning and said out loud, “Ok Lord, here I am.”

Then I just sat there with the water and the birds and whatever else was out there that early.

Proof that I took my headphones out. Also proof that I lasted about four seconds before pulling my phone right back out. Baby steps.

After a few minutes and a headful of racing thoughts, nothing seemed to be happening. It was just the sounds of the early morning all around me. Then a thought started to form that I know for certain I didn’t put there. It started small, but after another couple minutes it became pretty clear why I’d been dreading the trip. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to spend a week watching a bunch of boys make memories with their dads.

I lost my dad almost three years ago, and under all the grumpiness I’d been carrying around for weeks was a guy who just missed his dad.

A while back I wrote about Chip Dodd’s eight core emotions, and lonely is one of them. If you’d asked me how I was doing that week I would’ve said annoyed, or tired, or just hot, seeing as it was like 99° the whole week. I don’t think lonely would’ve crossed my mind.

But sitting there on that bench, I could feel the loneliness deep down inside me. And as embarrassing as it might sound, I think an even smaller part of me was jealous that these boys were getting time with their dads that I wish I could have back.

Here’s the thing I didn’t see coming though. I had my dad for most of my life, so honestly, I never really needed God to be a father to me. I already had one. I knew “God the Father” was in the Bible and all, but it was mostly just something I said, not something I’d ever actually experienced. Now that my dad’s gone, and sitting there on that bench missing him, I got to experience God as a Father who just wanted to be with me. He didn’t fix anything or explain anything. He just sat there with me.

Through some tears and a little more quiet, I felt something like a hundred pounds come off me. I thanked God for showing me what it was, walked back to the cabin, and got to actually be with my daughter for the rest of the trip instead of just being near her.

That’s when I started to suspect those eight minutes on the work trip were never about boredom. I think I hated the quiet because of what it was going to bring up, and some part of me knew it.

•••

Feelings, Desires, Trust in that Order

Over the last few weeks I started reading John Mark Comer’s new book, Into the Quiet, and it put words to a lot of what I’d stumbled into on that bench.

One thing he points out is how often Jesus did this. We all know about the forty days in the wilderness, but he kept going back to his whole ministry. Mark says he got up while it was still dark and went off to a solitary place to pray (Mark 1:35), and the disciples had to go find him because the whole town was looking for him. Luke says the crowds kept getting bigger and Jesus “often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16).

The busier he got, the more he left.

The part of the book that stuck with me the most is Jesus in Gethsemane. It’s the worst night of Jesus’ life and he doesn’t fake his way through it. He doesn’t tell his friends it’s all part of God’s plan and he’s fine. (Sound familiar?) He doesn’t shrug it off or try to numb it. He goes off to pray, and Comer points out that he prays three things, in order.

He gives God his feelings: “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Matthew 26:38).

He gives God his desires: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me” (v. 39). The cup is the cross. He’s pretty much saying he doesn’t want to go.

And then he gives God his trust: “Yet not as I will, but as you will” (v. 39).

Comer’s argument is that Jesus is leaving us a pattern here, and the order matters. I think that’s where I’ve gotten it wrong for most of my life. I’ve prayed “your will be done” over plenty of things I never actually admitted I was upset about, and most of the time it felt like signing a form. I was skipping straight to the trust part without ever being honest about the first two.

The desires part has been the hardest for me.

Comer’s version of that prayer is really simple: “God, here I am. I want ___. I give this desire to you.” That opening line caught my attention because they’re almost exactly what I said on that bench a month before.

•••

The Chatter Is the Fight

The book also spends a good amount of time on the desert fathers and mothers, which I’d never heard of before and am now pretty obsessed with. If you know me at all, that probably doesn’t surprise you. For about three hundred years, following Jesus could get you killed. Then Rome made it legal, and the church went from persecuted to powerful pretty quickly. A handful of people looked at that and walked out into the deserts of Egypt and Syria to be alone with God.

One of the first was a guy named Antony. He shut himself in an abandoned Roman fort for years, and people who came out to find him said they could hear him through the walls, yelling at demons to get away from him.

I read some of this to our Rafa House family a few weeks ago and told them I’d decided I wanted to be known as a desert father. Considering I lasted eight minutes, I’m probably more of a desert father with AirPods.

But Antony would’ve laughed at the idea that silence is relaxing. He went out there looking for God and ran straight into a fight.

Comer’s honest about the fact that most of us aren’t going to see monsters when we sit down in the quiet. Mostly we’ll just hear a lot of chatter in our heads. His point is that the chatter is the fight. It’s the voice that says you’re on your own, nobody’s really listening, and if people knew the real you it’d be over.

That’s what my noise was keeping out. And it turns out those voices lose a lot of their power once you say them out loud to God instead of drowning them out.

•••

Start Small

So here’s what I’d offer, from a guy who is still mostly bad at this.

Start smaller than you think you need to. Try the first few minutes of your morning with nothing on. Take a walk without your headphones. Let your phone sleep in another room for a night. When you sit down, say it out loud if that helps, “Ok Lord, here I am,” and then don’t fill the space.

Your mind is going to wander about ten seconds in. That’s normal, just come back. And if something comes up, let it. Give him the feeling first, then whatever you want underneath it, and then your trust, in that order.

I still have something playing most of the day—in fact "Day by Day" by Kings Kaleidoscope is playing as I write this post. I still grab my phone at red lights. Some mornings, like today, I sit there for five minutes and the only thing that comes up is my to-do list. But I’m sitting there, which is more than I was doing before.

Psalm 46:10 says “Be still, and know that I am God”. I used to read that like a nice suggestion for a slow afternoon. Now it reads more like an invitation to sit long enough to find out what’s actually in there, and to find out he’s been sitting there with it the whole time.

Eight minutes used to feel like forever. These days I’m just trying to make it to nine.