Don’t Be Scared of the Quiet
One night last year, three of my close friends and I were on FaceTime for HOURS. The time was probably close to four hours. Being we were grown women with lives, ending the phone call sometime around midnight shouldn’t have been an issue. However, as soon as I said “bye” to my girls and stood in an empty room with the darkness and quietness overcoming the room, the feeling of emptiness grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I thought about calling my best friend (since I’m usually the suffer in silence type), but we just got off the phone so I didn’t want to seem needy.
Unlike other times, I began talking to God. Deep down, I knew after spending hours laughing with my girls shouldn’t end with a drastic decline to tears. The more I talked, the more I realized that the surface-level issue of being alone wasn’t the root problem. God exposed the root problem of low self-worth, low self-love and the disbelief that people actually love and care about me was a culmination of trauma that started in childhood.
It was during this conversation with God I decided to go back to therapy with the quickness.
If you constantly need to be around people or talk to people, there may be an underlying issue there but you are repeatedly drowning out God. When you feel like life is too quiet, you turn on the television, engross yourself with a book, get on social media or do something else that drowns out God.
We are so ashamed and scared to cry and to ask God “why are we crying” that we unintentionally send ourselves in a toxic cyclic pattern.
Instead of running from the quietness, try running to it. I challenge you to look deep within yourself and see what it is you’re running from. Have those conversations with God that you’re ashamed to admit in public. For example, “Lord, that relationship I was in when I was younger did more damage than I realized.”
God can work with honesty. God didn’t begin to heal me and deliver me until I became honest with Him about things He already knew.
It’s hard to have a conversation in a noisy atmosphere, so get somewhere quiet with God and have that much needed conversation.
Don’t be scared of the quiet.
Scriptures:
Psalm 46:10
Matthew 6:6
Matthew 14:22-23
Psalms 91:1
