I never thought of myself as someone who craved silence.
But I think it’s true.
I do actually need those moments when I walk in the quiet dark of morning or the fading sunlight of afternoon and I am the only one present for what God has to show me.
I have found that without moments of silence, particularly in the morning hours, I get a little grumpy.
This morning, in fact, I was enjoying my bit of silence prepping my breakfast as my limbs were just starting to come alive when three little boys burst onto the scene far earlier than their appointed curtain call.
And boy was I grumpy.
“Boys! You aren’t supposed to be up yet! Stop riling up the dog! No I can’t settle the argument between you two right now. I don’t know why your iPad isn’t working. We need to play the quiet game… in our rooms… for at least half an hour more.”
I was on fire. I mean after all, I get up at 4AM for a reason. How dare they break into my thoughts before I was ready for them?!
Who knows what would have come to me in that quiet! Who knows what wonderful and magical things I would have come to know!
It was all there at my fingertips… if I could have only stayed a bit longer.
But that’s not the reality of this moment in life for me. I get to grab seconds of silence here and there and I need to acknowledge that they may only be fleeting.
I need to remember that though great poets and wonderful writers tout the beauty and clarity silence provides, they sometimes miss the fact that great beauty and clarity can come in the mayhem too.
In this poem by Mary Oliver, she acknowledges that maybe she should have stayed a bit longer on a bench in the woods and then maybe the something she was waiting for would have magically appeared.
But maybe it just wasn’t the right time yet.
Maybe it wasn’t the season where sitting longer was possible.
And so maybe the magic would wait.
Or maybe it would follow her out of the woods and find it’s place in the mayhem lying just outside the tree line.
Either way… there is magic – I would call it grace… awaiting all of us in the silence and the mayhem… meeting us where we are.
