January – Week 3

Pause & Breathe Challenge

Silence & Solitude

This is how I pause: I soak myself in Silence & Solitude

Our first year as a married couple, my husband and I lived in the outskirts of Jammu, a great sprawling    city in the North of India with five-hundred thousand people. We just received an outreach from South Africa. As they returned home to family and familiar foods, bearing beautiful gifts and news of a great world in tremendous spiritual need, we returned to our one-room dwelling with carton boxes for windows and no bathroom. Christmas was at hand, and we decided to fast during the seven days until New Year. We wanted to seek God, not only for Himself but also for our time in India and our wider calling as missionaries. 

It was in many ways the easiest fast we ever did, as we spoke little Hindi, knew no one and found the local food foreign and spicy. It was in this time of silence and solitude, cut off from loved ones, our home office and the rest of our team in southern India that God started to speak to us about our specific assignment for the years to come. 

This discipline of withdrawal from the world and all that tastes and sounds familiar is rarely written about, encouraged by the church or discussed by the mainstream media – always ready to feed our indulgences. If we want to be spiritually strong and healthy, able to separate the important from the trivial, the worthwhile from the waste,[1] it is imperative that we intentionally seek out and search for opportunities to become active listeners to God. 

Instead, our lives are endlessly filled with noise, activity and people. Whether at home, work or play, we mostly embrace company and thrive in community. With billboards shouting at us, bosses directing us, the radio informing us, and social media entertaining us, we are suckers for information. Whether in person or online, we all, to a certain degree, have itching ears, surrounding ourselves with a significant number of ‘teachers’ who say what we want to hear, filling up on spiritual junk food[2] as Eugene Peterson calls it. 

Yet, God wants us to enlarge our spiritual centre, growing stronger in the inner man, bringing order to our inner sanctuary, for much confounds us, both in the world at large and our own private lives. Sadly, my default seems to be the axiom; the more confused I am, the faster I go, instead of when in doubt, pause. Thus, I am again challenged to find time to retreat more regularly and seek silence more frequently in this new year. 

As we are sitting at the feet of friends and Christians this year, older and younger people who have all found unique and creative ways to pause and reboot, my sincere prayer is that we will learn, grow and hold each other accountable. Richard Foster reminds us that simply to refrain from talking, without a heart listening to God, is not silence, for silence and solitude is to see and hear – both God (and others) better. 

Depending on our season, we may either be encouraged by today’s message or disheartened by it. Therefore, whether you are a homemaker, a homeschooler or a working Mother, having young children or older ones, it is my prayer that there will be no condemnation, only conviction. As I look back on my life, there is one piece of advice I have cherished and implemented most regularly – to always be on the lookout for what Richard Foster calls ‘little solitudes’. Whether these moments are Sabbath seconds, Sabbath minutes, Sabbath hours or Sabbath days, I pray that you will actively seek them out this year! It is a most excellent way to redeem time, as Paul urges us to do and find new joy and meaning in the humdrum and ordinary routines of our lives.

Remember

• Without silence, there is no solitude. 
• Inward solitude has outward manifestations.
• Control rather than no noise is the key to silence. 
• Going away from people helps us to be truly present with people
• The purpose of silence and solitude is to see and hear. 

[1] Gordon MacDonald, Ordering Your Private World, p.151

[2] 2 Timothy 4:3 MSG