Back at the Ranch

One of the joys of being a Youth and Family Ministry major at ACU was that you know that for the rest of your life you would never be without a multitude of $15 paperback books involving some new twist on Youth Culture. Apparently, you collect them all for your "library", and I am no different -- I have a bookshelf literally full of them in my office. Slowly and surely the collection grows, some books are there because they were gifts or class requirements, never to be opened or used again. Others are there just for the fact that you feel you should have a copy of it, but will probably still fall in the previous category. Yet there are others, books that you find yourself constantly opening, relentlessly referring to, never to fall to waste or decoration. Why? Because they are the special, handpicked tools that shape not only your ministry, but your relationship, your image of the One True God. I have no doubt that both categories will continue to grow and blossom in their own respect, but for now I'll leave you with this one: a small, one day read that will change the rest of your life: When God Is Silent by Barbara Brown Taylor. Read it, I will not even attempt to summate it's poignant brilliance, but I will leave you with an intriguing conversation it stirred in me... the idea of silence.

Maybe it's because I've literally never lived by myself. Maybe it's because the guy who lives in the room next to me is the loudest person I know, or maybe I'm just getting old and cynical, but I have begun to cherish the rare moments of silence. It wasn't always that way. When I made it into 6th grade I received my first alarm clock. My mother had deemed it time for me to wake up on my own, not by the spraying of a water bottle in my face or the singing of an annoying song. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a simple device with one alarm and a built in radio. It was the beginning of the end of silence for me.

I used the radio all the time. Whenever I found myself in the room, the radio was on. It wasn’t because I was belligerent and wanted to annoy everyone. It was to keep myself from becoming bored, because where there was silence, for me there was discomfort. I learned to drive, and everywhere I went the radio went there with me. I saved and saved to purchase a nice Sound System for my new car, 3-way speakers, a Clarion CD Player, all to ensure there would always be high quality sound. I went to college and bought a computer to reap the benefits of a free napster and fast internet connection. Well over 3,000 songs, and probably twice that many viruses, kept a constant barrage of musical distraction circulating through my room. I actually went to bed every night with the radio on, not because I listened to the music, but because I didn’t want to listen to the silence, because the silence spoke to me, and silence could not prevail.

I have relied on an alarm clock every day since then. It has become a welcomed noise amidst the silence. I now need a clock with two alarms, because I have become so adjusted to only one. I need the noise, I must have it, because without it there is only silence, and I don’t want to go there.

Silence in the final frontier, the last of the unknown. You cannot navigate or understand silence without breaking it, without introducing sound. It makes us uncomfortable because we don’t know what’s going on, the silence speaks in a language that we cannot understand. You cannot grasp or control silence; you can only exist in it. It is a world full of, built with, unknown.

This is why we have awkward silences, because we believe something should be said or done to not allow silence to prevail. We disarm silence with witty comments or clever sayings to beat it back down. Radio stations fill our time with noise; all in the avoidance of their arch enemy silence they call “dead air”. Noise dominates our society, who we are, because we are afraid of silence, silence cannot prevail. Everywhere we go there is noise, in the car we need the radio, it has to be on even when we choose to talk with each other instead. Silence cannot prevail. In the house while we do our chores we need to have the radio blaring or the TV on while we eat dinner. Silence cannot prevail. In the gym there are TVs by the treadmills and MP3 players attached to everyone’s arms. Silence cannot prevail. On the train or subway, around every corner in the city there lurks an I-pod, silence cannot prevail.

We will not permit silence to prevail because in silence there is discomfort, the discomfort of knowing that there is only one place to turn in silence… inside. And looking inside is one of the scariest places to see. Silence speaks, it speaks to us in ways more powerful than words can ever hope or describe. The silence after a bad joke speaks infinitely more than the laughter following a funny joke. The silence of waiting, the ticking of the clock or humming of computer can’t even fill that void. The silence after a death carries a life of its own. Silence carries a power, a void that noise can only hope to fill.

And it was never more beautifully illustrated than by a simple silent story: On a hill, 2000 years ago, hung the Son of the Living God, the God who spoke this world into existence, who shattered silence with His own voice and brought life, brought creation. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we chose to sentence him to die, speaking the words that brought death to the author of life. And at that moment, when the Almighty God could have given the command, spoken the single word that would end the pain of His suffering Son, He chose instead to be silent.

Through that silence the Loving God literally spoke for us, for eternity, that no longer would silence need to be uncomfortable, no longer when we searched inside ourselves would we be scared of what we find. That in the moment of greatest noise during our spiritual warfare, when all of creation clamored, even the sun itself stopped shining, The Word was silent – and in that moment, silence prevailed.

Maybe it is because I'm older and more cynical, maybe that’s what allows me to appreciate silence. Or maybe it's the fact that I have finally realized that silence isn't such a scary thing at all, because there is a God, who through his most uncomfortable silence eliminated my discomfort with it. Now, when I look inside, I don't see who I was, but the person I've been redeemed to be. That is how silence speaks to me