Have I spent most of my adult life hating silence?But I didn’t know. I was a great blind spot, I ignored my constant desire to be with people simply by being extroverted and attributed my talking nature to my intense relational instincts. These qualities seemed to help me in my pastoral interactions with people, so I didn’t think about it, didn’t they before I started my own journey?For the meeting? During a personal crisis in which I faced this long-standing disappointment.
My counselor has observed in my life behavior that has gone unnoticed for the most part, but has become a sign of concern for him. I ran away from being alone. I was uncomfortable with the silence. He often dominated conversations. This revealed my terrible listening skills, that the counselor had the wisdom to link with the problems of silence, pushed me into this area and was difficult, this led to an implosion of my soul, but began a desperately necessary healing process.
Through this personal discovery, the Lord taught me four lessons about the value of silence.
If emotions are the gateway to the soul, silence exposes the soul. I was not prepared to face the ugly things that had been exposed, but God, in His grace, found me powerfully, and my path brought new peace into my life. It was through silence in a quiet place, meditating on truth and prayer asking for God’s help, that I experienced this deeper level of grace and presence.
If a pastor wants to have a prolonged ministry, he must learn to seek that kind of silence. That silence is not a form of secular meditation, but biblical silence and loneliness. Don Whitney considers it an important spiritual discipline in the Christian life. a stillness that allows us to be more aware of the activity of our souls, while the Holy Spirit lives and works in us; it is a discipline by which we communicate with Jesus, becoming more aware of his truth and presence, and more receptive to His infinite grace The puritanical scholar and long-time pastor Joel Beeke expresses the kind of meditation that promotes this experience:
Puritan meditation engages the mind with God’s revealed truth to ignite the heart of affection for God and transform life into obedience. Thomas Hooker put it this way: “Meditation is a serious intention of the mind, through which we come to seek the truth and effectively establish in the heart. “The direction of our mind reveals the true love of our hearts, which is why Hooker said that those who love the Word of God meditate on it regularly (Psalm 119:97). Therefore, puritanical meditation is not repeating a sound, emptying the mind or imagining physical visions and sensations, but a concentrated exercise of thought and faith in the Word of God.
These voices are the messages we hear about ourselves, it is the voices of those who pass through the space of our lives and ingest messages that the enemy likes to whisper over and over in our ears, are the interpretative messages of who they are when these voices are harsh, abusive and lie about our courage and identity in Christ, are unpleasant and we flee from them.
Those voices haunted me. Abusive voices from my past, lies from the enemy, and words of painful criticism have created these messages of failure and self-loathing. They were especially good when I was alone. Then, to escape the voices, I escaped from the silence, but I needed the silence to face these voices, to counter the lies that I had long believed in with the truth of the gospel. :
The main problem on this whole issue of spiritual depression is, in a sense, that we allow ourselves to speak to ourselves rather than talk to ourselves. Am I trying to be deliberately paradoxical? Away from there. This is the essence of wisdom in this area. Have you noticed that most of your unhappiness in life is due to listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?
Silence allows us to face the reality that when we listen, instead of talking to ourselves, we often hear harsh words overwhelming our souls.
I was deeply concerned to discover that he had been a pastor for so long and that he was always a bad listener. Of course, I listened, but it was mainly to prepare an answer. Do I need to learn to listen without having to answer? Just to listen and show empathy.
As I embraced silence, I realized that I was learning to listen. I heard sounds around me that I had never noticed before; I felt more receptive to the Word of God; it’s amazing what happens when you’re not worried about trying to listen. find out what to say or do next.
I had no idea what: noise every time my soul tormented myself in silence. Silence exposes the soul and proves how much we depend on noise to block out our pain. This is one of the many reasons why we all need periods of time away from our phone, emails, social media and all the electronic devices that create the constant source of noise.
Pastors don’t have to try too hard to find noise and distraction, but silence is another matter, we have to fight for it. Silence challenges us to face our pain and allow the gospel to penetrate deeply into our souls, where we find healing.
During a retreat of silence, I found these words (embracing silence) in a room dedicated to silence and loneliness:
The rule of silence was seen as important here as a way to ensure that this pricing is not wasted, but requires a cooling-off period due to slowdown and few conversations. Communities that respect human growth probably need to explicitly predict loneliness; the source of enrichment is lost.
I hated silence, but little by little I realized that I had to make an “explicit arrangement for loneliness” for the love of my soul.
Jesus delivered us from the power of sin, shame, and death and saved us from the wrath of God we deserve. It’s all by grace. Our identity is now in Christ and we are eternally adopted children of God. We have the Holy Spirit who dwells in each of us by faith, becoming more and more like Jesus every day. However, many Christians are unable to deeply feel the power of God. grace in the gospel.
This includes pastors and has been so for most of my ministry
Silence is a wonderful tool and a gift from God to bring this consciousness. Accept silence as this comforting and comforting balm for your noisy and restless soul.