When was the last time you sat in true silence?
Not the silence of an empty house where you immediately fill the void with a podcast. Not the silence of the car where you turn on the radio before you have even reached the end of the driveway. Not the silence of bedtime where you scroll until your eyes heavy and close, just because the quiet feels a little too loud.
I mean real silence. Chosen silence. The kind where you sit down, put nothing in your ears and just let the world be still.
I tried it last week. I set a timer for three minutes. Three. Not thirty. Not a whole hour. Just three minutes.
I lasted about forty seconds before my brain started its relentless list. Groceries. That email I forgot to send. The appointment on Thursday. The looming pressure of month-end procedures and mid-year performance metrics. Jip that is happening soon. Whether I turned the heater off. That one thing I said to a friend last week that she probably doesn’t even remember, yet I have already replayed it seventeen times in my head.
Forty seconds.
And I thought: No wonder I cannot hear God. My own noise is absolutely deafening.
The Crowded Room
I think most of us talk to God the way we talk to a friend in a crowded noisy restaurant. We lean across the table, raise our voices and try to be heard above the clatter. We pray our lists. We present our daily requests. We fill every second of silence with words because, somehow, silence makes us feel like God isn’t there.
But what if He is there? What if He has been speaking this entire time? What if the problem was never that God stopped talking, but that we stopped being able to hear?
“The Lord was not in the wind. The Lord was not in the earthquake. The Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.” — 1 Kings 19:11-12
A gentle whisper. Not a shout. Not a glowing sign in the sky. Not a burning bush (though He can certainly do those, too). A whisper. The kind of sound you completely miss if you are not paying attention. The kind that requires you to draw close. The kind that asks you to stop moving.
Elijah was standing on a mountain. Wind tore the rocks apart. An earthquake shook the very ground he stood on. Fire swept through. God was in none of it.
He was in the whisper that came after.
Maybe the first six months of your year were the wind, the earthquake, the fire. Maybe they were loud and shaking a consuming blur of tight deadlines, balancing ledgers, family demands and just the sheer weight of keeping everything running. Maybe God was not in any of that noise.
Maybe He is in the whisper that comes now. In the stillness. In the second half.
But you have to be quiet enough to hear it.
The Three-Minute Practice
I am not going to ask you to sit in silence for an hour. I am not even going to ask you for ten minutes. I know you. I know your life. I know that ten uninterrupted minutes can feel like asking for the moon.
Three minutes. That is all.
Here is how it works:
- Sit down. Anywhere. The car. The edge of the bed. The kitchen table after everyone has left. The bathroom floor if that is literally the only door with a lock.
- Set a timer for exactly three minutes.
- Close your eyes. Take one slow, deliberate breath. And ask one question: “God, what do You want me to hear today?”
- Then stop. Do not answer for Him. Do not fill the silence with what you think He should say. Do not mentally quote a verse you memorised in Sunday school. Just wait.
Your brain will start its list. Let it. Do not fight it. Let the groceries and the emails and the Thursday appointments float through your mind like clouds. They will pass.
Somewhere beneath them, in the quiet gap between one frantic thought and the next, there might be something. A word. An image. A feeling. A verse you forgot you knew. A name. A nudge. A warmth in your chest that was not there before.
Write it down. Whatever comes. Even if it seems small. Even if it seems like nothing.
Especially if it seems like nothing.
Because God does not always speak in grand revelations. Sometimes He speaks in the faintest impression. The lightest touch. The quietest knowing that you are simply not alone.
Your Journaling Prompt: The Listening Page
After your three minutes of silence, open your journal and answer these:
1. What has God been saying to me this year that I keep brushing past? Be fiercely honest here. There might be a theme you have noticed in your prayers, your 3am check-ins, your conversations, or your reading. A single word that keeps showing up. A nudge that keeps returning. A door you keep walking past because you are just not ready to open it yet. Write it down. You do not have to act on it today. You just have to acknowledge you heard it.
2. What keeps surfacing? Not what you want to surface. What actually surfaces. The same dull ache. The same longing. The same quiet discontent. The same flicker of hope that refuses to die, no matter how many times you try to bury it under your daily busyness. That thing? It keeps surfacing for a reason.
3. If I had to describe the message of the year so far in one sentence, what would it be? One sentence. Not a paragraph. Not a complex theology. One simple sentence. Let it be simple. Let it be true. Mine, this year, is: “You are allowed to need.” I have been sitting with that for weeks. I do not fully understand it yet. But it keeps coming back. In the silence. In the prayers. In the three minutes before the timer goes off. What is yours?
The Walk
I have one more small invitation for you this week.
Go for a walk. Just once. Without earphones. Without a phone call. Without music. Without a podcast.
Just your feet the winter air and whatever God wants to say in the silence between your steps. It does not need to be a hike. It could be around the block even to the shop and back.
Pay attention to what comes to you while you walk. Not what you think about. What comes to you. There is a distinct difference. Thinking is something you actively do. What comes to you is something that arrives. It finds you. It lands on your shoulder like a bird you did not call.
When you get home, write just one line in your journal about what arrived.
Even if it was nothing. Even if all that arrived was the chill on your face, a beautiful dove-grey sky and the steady sound of your own breathing.
That is enough. That is the still water your soul is being restored in it, whether you feel it in this exact moment or not.
With so much grace,
Debbera