"Embracing Silence: How to Cultivate the Spiritual Habit of the Quiet Life"
I enjoy the quiet life!
The problem is life in general, at least our current culture pushes back on quiet.
The spiritual discipline of quiet like all spiritual disciplines requires intention on our part. The world remember is in general opposed to God and all the many disciplines associated with Him.
The world, the flesh, and the devil distract us whenever possible from scripture, prayer, confession, and repentance, and into the sinful life the world boasts about. Christians in the West believe that being busy is important fruitful, and productive. We’ve forgotten how to be quiet and more or less have abandoned stillness as a way of life.
“Be still and know that I am God,” is often repeated but the experience of being still and knowing God is a foreign concept to most of us. Silence is a deafening annoyance to most people as we reach for the radio or as a conversation lulls, and we awkwardly try to fill the gap. Headphones, podcasts, music, etc. as we fill every moment with mind-numbing noise.
In our continued dumbing down of culture thinking is out of favor, it is hard and most would rather be entertained. Also, reality is hard and often anxiety-producing so we ignore it. (And create alternate fantasy realities like QAnon, Trumpism, etc., so common today in our reality-denying lives).
God calls on us to rest, stillness, and quiet is not a bad word. We have made it so.
What can you do to break your habits of noise and distraction?
Choose a quiet discipline and stick with it. Read scripture privately, pray, and be still. Yes God is present in the small quiet still things of life just as he is in the cosmic reaches of space and time.
But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one. 1 Thess. 4:10–12
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