The Quiet Before A Going

Maeve has been asking for direction for eleven years and she has never once sat still long enough for an answer to arrive.

That is not how she would describe it. She would say she prays about it constantly, and that is true, and she is not a shallow person and this is not a message about somebody who does not pray.

Here is what actually happens, and she saw it herself last winter.

She asks. Genuinely, properly, often in the car. And then, in the gap that follows the asking, which is where an answer would go, she begins to think about the options. Not idly. Carefully. She weighs the three things she could do, she works through the second-order consequences of each, she notices something she had not considered and follows it, and by the time she arrives anywhere she has done twenty minutes of extremely competent thinking and the gap is entirely full.

She has never once left the gap alone.

And the thinking is good thinking. That is what makes this so hard to catch. It is not distraction. Nobody would look at it and say she was avoiding God; she is thinking about the exact thing she asked about, with her whole mind, in His presence.

It is simply that she is doing all the talking, in both directions.

She noticed on a bridge, of all places, having stopped to let a group catch up, standing still for about ninety seconds with nothing to do. And in the second half of that ninety seconds something began to surface in her that she did not put there, and then the group arrived and it went.

She has thought about those forty seconds ever since.

You have your own version. There is a gap after you ask, and you have never left it empty, and you have been calling the filling of it discernment.

Nobody is telling you the thinking is wrong. It is not. But there is a reason the word in Isaiah comes from behind you and not in front.

The word comes from behind, which means you have already started walking

There is a verse about guidance that almost everybody quotes and almost nobody notices the geography of.

And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.Isaiah 30:21

Behind thee.

Not ahead. Not a signpost standing at a junction in front of you with the options written on it, which is what everybody is actually asking for. Behind. Which means the person hearing it is already walking, and the word arrives as a correction to a motion that has already begun.

And look at the second half. When ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. It is spoken at the turn. It is not a briefing delivered in advance; it is a hand on the shoulder at the moment of a swerve.

That reframes the whole thing for somebody like Maeve, who has spent eleven years standing at what she believes is a junction, asking for a map, and filling every silence with her own excellent analysis of the three roads.

And you are not being withheld from. That is not my reassurance: the written word puts the voice behind a walking person rather than in front of a stationary one, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman standing on a bridge with forty seconds of unexpected quiet.

And the guidance is His to give and He is not slow about it. The word says the meek He will guide in judgment, and the guiding is His verb, and the Spirit is the one who does that work at His own pace, which means eleven years of not hearing is not eleven years of Him declining to speak.

Why the gap has to be empty, and it is not mystical

Now let me say plainly what I am not saying, because there is a version of this that turns into a technique and this site does not do techniques.

I am not telling you to empty your mind. That is not a Christian instruction and it is not what stillness means in Scripture. Be still and know is not the absence of thought; it is the presence of somebody else in the room being attended to.

And I am not telling you that thinking is unspiritual. Your analysis of those three roads is a gift and God gave you the mind that produced it, and a person who refuses to think and calls that faith is not being led, they are being lazy and blaming heaven for the results.

The point is smaller and it is about order.

Maeve asks, and then thinks, and the thinking begins about four seconds later. Four seconds is not a gap. It is a pause for breath in a monologue.

What she has never done is ask and then stay in the quiet past the point where it becomes uncomfortable, which for most of us is somewhere around forty seconds, and which is exactly where something began to surface on that bridge.

And you are able to stay in it. Not once you are more spiritual: the word says be still, and know that I am God, and the stillness is issued as an instruction to ordinary people rather than a capacity of advanced ones, and the Spirit is the one who makes it possible in a body that has been filling every silence for eleven years.

And what surfaces there is not yours to manufacture. The word says the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God, and the searching is His activity rather than yours, and He is the one who brings a thing up rather than you going down after it.

The other thing about walking

There is a second implication in that verse and it is the one that will annoy a careful person.

If the word comes from behind, you have to be moving.

Which means the posture of standing perfectly still at a junction until certainty arrives, which feels like the humble and obedient thing, may be the exact posture in which that particular voice is hardest to hear. Not because God is withholding from the cautious. Because a correction has nothing to correct.

That is not permission to charge off. It is the ordinary shape of most people's guidance: you take a reasonable step in a reasonable direction, and the adjustment comes at the turn.

And you will not be left to wander. Not without help: the word says the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and He delighteth in his way, and the ordering is His and the delight is His disposition toward the walking, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a comfort to somebody frightened of moving wrongly.