My Father’s Day gift from Maile this year is 48 hours of silence. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time now, get out into a cabin without my phone, without my computer, without any books to read or things to hide behind. I’ll take a journal and a pen, some hiking clothes and some food and a sleeping bag.
I want to watch the leaves rustle in the summer heat. I want to see the sun come up. I want to walk a trail and then stop and sit there for thirty minutes without checking my phone. These phones! These distractions!
Have you ever taken a moment to see what everything is distracting you from, what’s behind these facades we put up without even thinking?
I need this right now. I need to unplug and go into the silence. I feel that at some recent point in time I lost my writing, I lost my purpose. There was a period in my life when I spent time every day sitting in silence, and it was so refreshing. I learned so much about myself, often scary things, like the fact that I stuff a lot of anger down or that there are people I’ve never forgiven (not you). But there were good things, too, truths about myself, truths about what I wanted. Sitting in silence, removing all the distractions, allows these things to float to the surface.
What comes in the wake of silence are moments of true peace. Letting go. Opening up to God and finding myself moving with the natural rhythms of life instead of trying. to. force. open. every. door.
48 hours isn’t a very long time, in the grand scheme of things, but I’m hoping it will prove to be the first strikes of a wrecking ball that might just bring down the parts of this crumbling house that need to go. If I come to mind at some point in the next few days, pray for me?
See you soon.
Enjoy your silence, Shawn.
Thanks, Chris.
Shawn, As always your blogs are a blessing. I especially enjoy the fact that our babies are very close in age. Your words are such a help as I figure out this “parenting thing.” :-) My little one turned one a few weeks ago. It was fitting that I would read these words from my favorite book, Gift from the Sea. I think they echo what you are sharing here.
“In the sheltered simplicity of the first few days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other, the tranquil sky reflected on the face of the mother nursing her child. It is, however, only a brief interlude…One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to the original form of the relationship. More deeply still, there is no holding of a relationship to a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth….It is a small world that must be inevitably and happily outgrown. Beautiful. Fragile. Fleeting. But not, for all that, illusory.”
whoops! I meant to post this comment under your blog about your dad dropping you off for college. I’m sure you get the idea though. :-)
I found your blog by googling “Christian blogs” and you were like the third on the list of many. I briefly read this post and I thought it was interesting. Im fairly young and I struggle very much with distractions. I’m looking to find find that silence within me. I quite mind gives way to amazing things. I’m glad that I stumbled upon your post. I will definitely become a daily reader (if you post daily).
Call it even.