The sounds of silence

My small group is reading through "The Life You've Always Wanted" right now. This week was the chapter on the discipline of silence. How do you do with silence? I'm horrible at it. My brain is usually running 5 miles a minute and going off in every tangent imaginable. And yet silence is a good thing. Granted, some people are better at it than others, but that doesn't mean that those of us who struggle shouldn't do it. Jesus made it a point to go off on his own, spend time in prayer, and just be. He lived the ultimate unhurried life. And yet, he was almost constantly on the go. How do you do that? I think it's because he conciously took time from his day to be alone. To pray, to refocus. I usually don't stop to think about the day until it's pretty much over. But last night in small group we all went to different rooms and spent an hour in silence. A whole HOUR! We had no clocks, no music, no books, nothing but a piece of paper, a pen, and the Bible. It was tough. Not quite as tough as I thought, but I was still squirming towards the end. Mostly because I was in my own bedroom trying not to look at all of the other things I could've been doing.

But thinking back on last night, I'm glad we did it. It forced me to stop. To take time to regroup, focus on God, to pray, to read the Bible. How often in a day do we have an hour of uninterrupted time? Or make an hour of uninterrupted time? Most of the time we just go from one activity to the next, until the whole day becomes a blur. We end up just kind of floating along in life, not really living it. One quote from this week's chapter of the book really struck me. It talked about how busyness allows us to settle for a mediocre faith. That we're not in danger of abandoning our faith so much as we are in danger of accepting a mediocre faith. That's not good.

Lord, help me to take time to slow down and spend time each day focusing on you so that I never settle for mediocrity.