I wish you would keep silent. For you, that would be wisdom.
Job 13:5
Can you trust the silence of God, or do you feel the need to keep the chatter going? When you fear silence, it’s easy to start listening to the emotional noises that roll around inside of you and think of them as the voice of God. After all, how could he be silent—isn’t he supposed to be talking, guiding, helping? The answer is yes, but he doesn’t always do it with sound. Sometimes he lives in the silence.
Silence isn’t really just the absence of sound; it’s the absence of your stress over not being heard. The real question is, do you trust God to care for you without you having to tell him what you need? Does he know all or doesn’t he? Is he aware of what’s going on in every aspect of your life? The answer is yes, a thousand times yes. He knows it all and he isn’t avoiding your need. He’s fulfilling it in the way it needs to be fulfilled.
You have to trust the silence in order to find the comfort of God. When you can shut off the chatter of your emotional needs and just look at the amazing face of God—studying his Word, listening for his presence, and trusting that even if you never hear from him again, he is still right with you, never leaving you—then you can start to rest and lose the worry. In the silence you can hear better and learn to shut off your pesky emotions that want to yell and shout and pout over all that they feel they need.
Don’t confuse what the monk and writer Thomas Merton calls “the echo of our own emotional noise” with the voice of God. We grow so accustomed to the sound of our thoughts that it becomes hard to shut them off and live in the silence of God. Can you trust him to know what you require without you speaking of it? Can you trust him to fight your battles and defend your name? Can you trust the silence of God?