Wonder in the silence
I’ve gotten so much wrong. More than you could know.
For long seasons of my life, I’ve lived for myself. Selfishly oblivious to the needs of even the people closest to me. Distracted by noise, running from silence.
Through those times I’ve been taught something profound: I can’t make real change happen.
I just can’t do it. At a surface level, I might be able to become a bit more kind or a bit less rude, but fundamentally, my heart would remain unchanged: still only ever interested in what’s best for me. Every decision, big and small, totally influenced by what I want.
I could’ve spent a lifetime gradually shaping myself to become a bit more kind and a bit less rude, but I would still have ended my days with a self-absorbed, rotten heart.
Mercifully, I have been wrenched off that path. I have been pulled out of the noise and set in the silence of surrender. Again and again.
I have experienced real, radical change, not because I willed it to happen, but because of something bigger than me transforming me from the inside out. I was no closer to it when I was really good, and I was no further away from it when I was really bad. It wasn’t me who did it.
My heart has been captured, overcome and transformed by Jesus.
To be a Christian is to know this. It is to admit that you are not a good person, and that you never can be. It is to acknowledge that no part of you is truly good, and that it never will be. It is to accept that you have absolutely nothing to cling to but the only Person who ever was fully, truly good. The One who wants to capture, overcome and transform your heart. The One who pours out amazing grace with the power to transform a grey, self-centred, hopeless existence into one which bursts with rich meaning, purpose and colour. The One who died so that you can live.
Jesus.
This is what He says:
“Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.”
This is why Christians love Him. It’s why we want to know and follow Him. It’s why we long for others to know Him too. How could we not?
Come into that quiet place.
That still place.
Silent surrender.
Wake up out of the daydream. Mute everything that everyone has been shouting at you for your whole life. Listen to the questions that the deepest part of you is demanding to be answered. Find the silence beneath all of it and push into it. Just once.
Why am I never quite where I want to be? Why does it always feel like there’s more life I should be living? Why is it that the things I pin my hopes on never seem to fully deliver? Why don’t I ever feel whole?
What am I actually doing here?
What if this isn’t all there is?
What if everyone is wrong?
What then?
It changes everything.
Your whole life will flash by in a maelstrom of information and noise unless you choose to stop. You will forever drift towards information instead of wonder. Noise instead of silence.
But there is untold wonder waiting in the silence. You might already know what’s waiting for you there. Things you once believed.
Him.
He’s there.
He’s always been there.
Turn off your phone.
If you don’t walk into the silence now, if you don’t choose to take this opportunity to really risk exploring it, you might never know the wonder of it.
You might spend the rest of your days, forever hungry for more noise, occasionally resolving to shape yourself for the better, to then end it all with an unchanged, rotten heart, unprepared to meet Him.
This may be the only crack of light in that bleak future. Take it. Please.
Step into the silence.
See what meets you.
Ask the questions.
Encounter the One who’s waiting there.
Your life is more than this.
It’s bigger than this.
This could be the only opportunity you get to find out.
Take it.