EDITOR’S NOTE: This is story 1 in a trilogy.
Maybe silence is not God’s absence,
but the space where He finishes our sentences.
The morning began with the hum of everything - traffic swelling, phones glowing, headlines recycling yesterday’s fear. The world feels addicted to sound; quiet, these days, feels like a confession we are not ready to make.
I reached for my phone before I reached for prayer.
The gesture was small, but it said everything - that I was looking for comfort in noise instead of presence.
And even when I finally bowed my head, the clamor came with me:
unfinished tasks, unspoken words, the memory of a face I still could not forgive. Prayer, I realised, is not always peace.
Sometimes it is a battle against all the voices inside that refuse to kneel.
“Are you listening?” a thought whispered.
“Or are you only waiting for your turn to speak?”
The question stopped me.
Not out of guilt, but recognition.
Between one half-formed plea and the next, I ran out of words.
And in that small, trembling pause - barely a breath long - something met me. Not thunder. Not grandeur. Just a softness that stayed.
“Be still,” the old verse rose up from memory - not a command, but an invitation. Not “be quiet so I can speak,”
but “let the noise empty itself until you can hear what has always been here.”
“Do you hear Me?” the whisper asked again.
“You keep calling through the noise, but I have been here beneath it the whole time.”
And I knew then - God never competes with chaos. He simply outlasts it.
Every time we return to quiet, He is already waiting - like a father who never stopped setting the table for a conversation we keep postponing.
We think silence is empty, yet it is full - of unspoken forgiveness, of answers still forming, of grace we are not yet steady enough to hold. Maybe heaven’s first language is pause,
and everything else is translation.
What if our restlessness is not a flaw,
but the soul remembering that it was made for rhythm - for inhale and exhale, for speaking and listening, for stillness that heals what words cannot reach?
There are prayers that never leave the lips, but somehow still reach Him - sighs, glances, tears, small acts of surrender. Perhaps those are the prayers that matter most: the ones shaped not by eloquence, but by honesty.
Coin Drop:
The holiest sound in the world may be the one we finally stop trying to make.
Food for thought:
-When was the last time silence unsettled us - and what truth waited beneath it?
-How often do we confuse noise for connection?
-What might God be finishing in the pauses we keep trying to fill?
-If silence is a conversation, what is our soul saying back?
Prayer
Lord, quiet the corners of our mind until peace feels like breath again. Let every distraction fall away until only love remains.
Teach us that silence is not empty - it is You, waiting in the hum. Amen.
Maybe faith does not begin with words at all, but with the courage to let them go.