Silence

Ok, anyone who knows me knows that I do not do silence, rest, pauses, quiet, or reflection like I need to do. Someone sent the following to me, it appealed to me on a couple of levels, and I thought I would share it with you.

The Sound of Silence
Betsy Childs

I recently attended an elementary school talent show. Among the variety acts were several young pianists; listening to them play brought back memories of sitting through many long piano recitals. I remembered how prone young musicians are to rush their songs. The underlying assumption is that faster is better, and in their haste they plow through slow or meditative portions of a song, failing to give full value to the rests. I remember my piano teacher physically restraining my hand to keep me from hurrying ahead as she audibly counted out the full value of the notes.

It was only as I grew older that I learned not to just read the notes but to hear the music. I came to see that the rests and held notes in the music are every bit as essential to its beauty as the song's progression. What would Schumann's "Traumerei" or a Chopin nocturne be with out their pathos-laden pauses?

You may have noticed that God is not one to rush things. He isn't compelled to fill the silence for the sake of moving things along. Between the Old and New Testament, there were roughly four hundred years during which the people of Israel were without prophecy or revelation. Yet this silence, uncomfortable as it must have been for those believers who lived and died under it, only accentuated the crescendo when the Word became flesh.

Perhaps you are going through a period when it seems as though God has grown silent in your life. Silence tries the soul. Try as we might, we cannot explicate it, and the noise of nothing threatens to drown out faith. But consider for a moment that such a noticeable silence actually testifies that God has not always been silent. The fact that we can recognize an absence in fact bears witness that there has been a Presence.

I don't know anyone who would claim that the rests are their favorite portions of a song. But those silent beats are necessary to accentuate the other notes and allow the music to tell its story. So also in our lives, I believe that we will one day be able to see the value of the silences that give shape to our stories. We can take comfort that silence is hemmed on either side by a song.

Throughout the scriptures, prophets repeatedly cry out, "He who has an ear, let him hear!" We need to learn to listen in the silences as well as in the climaxes, for the silence itself may be what God wants us to hear. The silence will not last forever, and it will make the sound that follows even more glorious.


Betsy Childs is associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.