Sweet silence I beg
do not leave me
Rather, surround me
in your gentle arms
In your sweet caress
may I find peace
In your warm embrace
may I find love
In your quiet comfort
may I find forgiveness
Oh, most gentle spirit
graceful and true
In your presence
I know that God exists
In the sweetness of solitude
He speaks to me
These simple words were shared almost 5 years ago on my very first blog. Today, the quiet calls me back…
I close my eyes and I am there.
In a church with no walls yet with worship so free earthen boundaries could never contain it.
In a school where chalkboards perched precariously on chairs and sweet little faces peer around corners eyes wide with curiosity.
In the wall-less, roof-less “living room” of a home where sweet community is forged and prayers are spoken.
In a chair outside a church where water flows down faces and over feet – holy ground.
I am inhaling deeply the graces found once again in Haiti. Soon, I will share this incredible trip. Right now I am savoring (selfishly) the treasures in my soul.
It is calling again friends. This tropical island void of the commercial hype yet full of beauty in raw and hidden places. This place has long held a grip on my heart. Not because of waters and beaches but because of hearts and faces – beautiful ones who have been carved deep into my soul.
I am leaving again to visit Haiti. I ask for your prayers in the coming days – for us as we go and for those we will meet. Agendas have been planned but God’s hand will guide.
If you would like to read about Haiti and me…visit here for a few minutes.
It is quiet – not the eerie kind of quiet that sends shivers down the spine.
No, rather it is the enveloping quiet wrapping itself like a hug around the soul. It is the silence that caresses my heart to soften and awaken to His presence anew. I find it now in the early morning dark while the busy world slumbers. It is in this quiet hush that I hear His voice whisper.
I am learning not to fight the internal alarm clock that rouses me at 3am but instead embrace this quiet place. Open my eyes, my heart and my soul to the One whose whispers have too long been drowned out in the whir of life.
Be still, be calm, see, and understand I am the True God. Psalm 46:10 Voice
I sit here emptying myself of all the noise that has invaded my heart. It roars as water rushing through a crumbling dam. There is no way to stop it now – the force is too great and it spews me hollow. And yet, in this pouring out I am not left vacant but available…
Stillness has to do with seeing…the opening our eyes to another dimension, to the mystery of God that lies all about us. M. Mayne
…available to Him.
I struggle at times with who I am. Like a little girl with her nose pressed up on the cold glass, I peer into life from the outside. Wishing for more than what it is. A womb left hollow, empty from infertility. A dream buried deep and fear making it hard to uncover. Relationships laid low. The list is too long – the breaking too deep.
So, her words this past month struck a chord hidden within.
“You can give up the need to compete in the world when you can accept you are complete in Christ.”*
How do you feel complete when so much has felt unfinished? I have struggled to fill the cavernous holes with something, anything. I have ventured from one to another looking for fullness. More words pierce as she continues…
“Until you are ultimately known you are ultimately nomadic.”*
She knows me. I am cut to the core because she understands from where this heart travels. Only one who knows this path of want and wishing – whose feet have wandered along similar steps – can speak these words with a surgeon’s precision. She knows. Then the words of John the Baptist fall from her lips…
“Apart from the gifts that come from heaven, no one can receive anything at all.”
John 3:27 The Voice
I can barely exhale. My soul is impaled. Could it be – my life’s portion a gift?
You see all things; nothing about me was hidden from You. As I took shape in secret, carefully crafted in the heart of the earth before I was born from its womb…Every detail of my life was already written in Your book; You established the length of my life before I even tasted the sweetness of it.
Psalm 139:15, 16b (The Voice)
I was wrought in the darkness of the beginning. A work carefully crafted. A life fashioned for sweetness – His not mine.
A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.
Leonardo DaVinci
Her words are His brushstrokes of Light and I begin to see what was hidden in the depths. The art is exposed. Beauty revealed. Redemption uncovered.
She prods me not to be “seduced by the myth of scarcity”* but to hold what I have been given in gratefulness.
Her words remind me to study the Artist and “to live in trustful awe of your abundant God.”* In the understanding of who He is I will come to know the art I am.
For we are the product of His hand, heaven’s poetry etched on lives, created in the Anointed, Jesus, to accomplish the good works God arranged long ago.
Ephesians 2:10 (The Voice)
The canvas does not create – it submits. It is only the Artist who can determine the completeness of His work and by His hands alone can the masterpiece is revealed.
So let it be in me.
*Words of Ann Voskamp