Being Quiet Before God

This whole idea of being quiet before God is not for wimps. It is difficult business. If you are one of many people who find silence uncomfortable or frightening, listen to Randy Harris describe his experience when he arrived at Lebh Shomea, the house of prayer, or hermits' community, in South Texas:

     "It's hot and hermits don't have air conditioning. I live my life at a pretty rapid rate, like a lot of you do. The first experience there was just decompression. You're almost pacing the floor because you don't have anything to do. No television. No radio. No computer. No phone.
     "The first several days were an absolutely miserable experience. What happened to me is what happens to a lot of people when they do this. When I got quiet, with nobody but me and God, all of the sin and crud in my life came rushing to the surface. In my busyness with speaking and writing, I can usually keep that stuff pushed away. Like right now as I'm writing, I'm conveying the image of myself I want you to see. But when language is taken away from me, when an activity is taken away from me, and all I have is me and God's glory and holiness, then there's no place to hide.
   "And so I go to the hermit who is serving as my spiritual director and I say, 'This is what's going on and I don't really like it. I don't know if it's coming from me or from God or from Satan, and I don't know what to do.' He said, 'Let's don't worry about where it's coming from now. Let's think about what to do with it.' And he came up with just the right image. He said, 'This is like smoke coming out of a chimney' He says, 'If you want to you can try to cap the chimney, but all you're going to do is drive the smoke back down into the house. Which is what you've been doing your whole life. Or you could let it go.'
     "That's a lot easier to say than it is to do. But there was a moment a little later on in that experience where I started to be able to let that stuff go; and I discovered the truth in my heart that I already knew with my head, which is, 'God loves you just the way you are.' And in that moment the verse of a hymn came to me--a verse of 'Just As I am' which we seldom sing: 'Just as I am, thy love unknown has broken every barrier down.'
     "If you enter into this silent listening prayer, initially the experience may not be all that pleasant. But I want you to hear that the God who reveals is the God who heals. And if you stay around, there is something wonderful on the other side of that place. If you stick with it, you find that as God reveals the depths of sin in your heart, he then comes in and heals it. And the grace of God becomes not just a theory, but a reality. That's what happens when we start to listen." From: Soul Work: Confessions of a Part-Time Monk by Randy Harris (pp. 130-132).
(Leafwood Press, Abilene, TX, 2011

--Posted by Mama O.