I knew a pastor who once served a church on US 40, a major east-west highway before Interstate 70 bypassed most small American towns. The parsonage was right next door to the church. That pastor thought he would never get used to the noise of twenty-four-hour highway traffic right outside his bedroom window, but he did get used to it. Then one winter night a severe storm with heavy snowfall came and brought all traffic to a standstill. In the middle of that night, he awoke with a start, his eyes flew open, and he sat bolt upright in bed, wondering what that noise was he was hearing. He was hearing the silence. The silence had awakened him!
You have probably had experiences of that sort, perhaps in the middle of the night when the electricity has gone out. It’s quiet. The lights are out, the usually luminous digits of the bedside alarm clock are dark, no light is coming in through the windows, and it is quiet. There are no electric motors whirring, no hum of the refrigerator, nothing in the darkness but the silence. It is at times like those that we may hear sounds we do not usually hear—sounds that are always there, but that are usually drowned out by the noise of all that other stuff.
I wonder if God’s voice is like that. It is always there, but too often it is masked by the TV’s theater surround sound, the iPod blaring in our ears, the blower noise from the HVAC, and all the rest. Perhaps we should shut down those other things once in a while and just listen for God to speak to us. Perhaps we should learn the sound of God’s voice so that we can discern it amid all the din of the world. Perhaps we should set aside a quiet moment each day and commune with God.
In the midst of our troubles, our trials, our tribulations, our discouragement, when we have all but given up and would just as soon be swallowed up and put out of our misery, we will sometimes look for God in all the wrong places—in the wind, in the earthquake, in the fire, whatever. Because these are the wrong places, we will discover, as Elijah discovered, that God is not there. In a quiet moment that may follow our futile search, we will at last find God in the silence or in the void that follows. Then we will finally realize that God has been there all the time and would speak a word of comfort to us. “Peace,” says God. “Be still,” says God. “I am with you,” says God, and that is all we really need to know. In that moment, we can know that we will be all right, and that everything is as it should be.