One of the most important things I ever got to do as a head of school, which changed my life forever and shaped how I lead Grace, occurred in the summer of 2018. I had just finished defending my dissertation and had been awarded my PhD. It had been a particularly jammed season of my life, working two hours per night and all day on Saturdays for about four years to earn this degree. Afterward, our board kindly gave me a six-week sabbatical over the summer. This season of rest was a godsend for me.
I think it’s so important to have spiritual mentors in your life. It may be even more important when you get to be my age. It’s just more difficult because math begins working against you. God provided a man in Colorado who became a spiritual mentor to me and has since become a close friend. He cared for missionaries on furlough professionally at one point in his life, so I asked him to help me on my sabbatical. For about a week, I lived in his basement in Colorado Springs while he led me through a spiritual retreat in those mountain woods.
God met me in those woods and spoke to me. You see, throughout my life up until that point, I had seen God as a benevolent taskmaster; I imagined him slightly displeased with me and always thinking I could do a little better than I was. This perception of God led me on a desperate lifelong drive to achieve to be the best I could be, not necessarily as an act of worship, but subconsciously to earn his favor.
In those woods, God showed me that, instead of being slightly displeased with me, I was his beloved son. He was pleased with me, even as messed up as I was– the current me, not because of what I had done or would do, but simply because I was his child through Jesus. This changed everything for me and began a season of spiritual transformation that led to more spiritual growth over the past eight years than I had experienced in the 41 years I had been a Christian before.
Last Christmas, when we had our Leadership Team Christmas party, we had a gift exchange. We drew names. But, rather than a funny, white-elephant-type of gift, I asked my team to give an inexpensive but meaningful gift to the person whose name they had drawn that described a quality or characteristic they admired in that team member. My admissions director, who has been on my team for a long while and who has known me for nearly 30 years, gave me a glass jar filled with pocket change. She talked about how this jar represented the fact that she had seen God bring about “a lot of change” in my life, transforming me into someone who was more patient, kind, loving, and thoughtful.
As I gave thanks to the Lord (because, trust me, he’s the only one who could have brought about that change), I reflected on the fact that the spiritual discipline that contributed most to that transformation was contemplative prayer, which I practiced through solitude and silence.
As I talk about solitude and silence, I know many of us feel nervous. After all, we live busy, often frenetic and anxious lives. Corrie Ten Boom famously said, “If the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.” I still remember life before 2008, when iPhones were invented, or 2010, before the advent of social media, and life was super-busy even back then. Digital technology, in addition to helping us be better organized and in touch, has overwhelmed us with distractions, intruding on our ability to be quiet and focused.
In some sense, I think we’re afraid to be still and silent, not because we’re afraid we won’t hear anything from God, but because we’re afraid we will. We fear that God might bring us to terms with the lies we tell ourselves that are so very painful, the masks we use to cover our pain. We may fear what God tells us to do that we really might not want to do, dealing with things we might not want to do. Being still and silent takes courage in any culture, but particularly in one like ours. But, it’s so important, because in the stillness and silence:
- We hear God’s voice– Your Father wants a relationship with you. And, relationship means conversation. He doesn’t intend your prayer life to be a monologue. He wants to speak to you. He does that most often through his word and the life and ministry of Jesus. But he also wants you to hear his voice. Over the years, one of the things that has amazed me is, like with Elijah, God doesn’t speak through the earthquake, the rain, and the wind, meaning he doesn’t speak most of the time in big, overwhelming ways. Because our God is a big, overwhelming God, a consuming fire, that’s the way we expect him to speak. In our distraction, it’s even how we want him to speak, so his voice can be like a 2×4, whomping us upside the head and getting our attention. But Jesus describes himself as gentle, lowly, and meek, and it’s always amazing that God doesn’t barge into our lives most of the time to speak. Like Elijah, he speaks in a gentle whisper, in an economy of words. We have to listen for it, which requires us to be silent and still and listen.
- Stillness and silence allow us to meditate on his love, which changes us. For years, it frustrated me that I didn’t love others the way I wanted. I tried, sacrificed, mustered up loving thoughts, and would always be frustrated by my shortcomings.
David Benner, in his work, “Surrender to Love,” diagnoses my problem. Nothing changed because my focus was still on me: my remorse, discouragement, and effort. Love can’t come simply from discipline and resolve. It has to come from the heart. The love I need is the love of God as his love becomes mine. Finally, I realized that to love like that was supernatural, and it could only come as an outpouring, a realization of how much I am loved by God as his child. So, I spent more time in his presence, in silence and solitude before him, in prayer and his word, letting his love transform me.
Benner notes that it’s only when we come to him amid our failures and let his love wash over us that we’re transformed, and stillness and silence are a gateway to that process.
It’s in the stillness and silence where God reveals our new identity: Throughout Scripture, God talks about how we who are reborn will be given a new “name,” which means a new identity. God wants to reveal to us the fullness of who we are as a new creation, who he has made us to be. He wants us to live in the fullness of our identity.
Because we live in a fallen world, we lie to ourselves, and the devil lies to us about our identity and who we are, and we believe that about ourselves and act on it. That, in a large sense, is what shame, in the evil sense, is all about. A lie that we or the devil tell us about ourselves that we act upon to our harm. And it’s self-defeating. One of the reasons it’s self-defeating is because God won’t speak to us there. He won’t address us or guide us in a false identity, but only in the context of who we really are.
As Henri Nouwen says, “Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter- the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the living God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.”
In short, silence and stillness is where we begin practicing the presence of God. It really is how we cultivate the peace that passes understanding. Because solitude never actually means being alone; it just means cultivating God’s presence with you. And that presence can give you peace even in the midst of noise and confusion all around you. It’s why so many times in Jesus’ ministry, he retreated to be alone with God and to pray. In doing so, it gave him the strength and peace he needed to conduct his ministry. If he needed it, we obviously do, too.
You may think, “This is impossible; I can’t do this.” But I’ll bet you can. Because God is a person, you can have a relationship with him like others.
Have you ever been in a car with someone you loved on a road trip, maybe a spouse, and not said a word? Just enjoyed their presence. Didn’t feel like you had to talk? What about sitting in a deer blind, or by a campfire, or staring at the lake? This is what it’s like: John Mark Comer describes it as “I look at him, and he at me, and we’re happy.” I always envision a place I love on Lake Tyler, where the Lord and I sit in chairs staring at the lake together. This is a contemplative type of prayer, a prayer of presence and being with God, that’s even deeper than just asking him for things (although, at times, it’s really important to intercede on behalf of others) This type of prayer will transform you into someone different, more Christlike.
If it’s this important, how do we practice silence and solitude? How do we begin?
In his classic Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster talks about making the most of all the “little solitudes” that punctuate our days. This means starting by reflecting on how many little moments there are in our days when we could be still, times we currently fill with digital distraction. Maybe it’s early in the morning before the kids are up, driving in the car to work or running errands, or in the bathroom doing whatever you do to get ready, or walking between meetings, or exercising. Our default is to turn on music or podcasts or TV or to call someone, but what if we used these times just to be more peaceful and focused on the Lord?
When I begin, I close my eyes (or keep them open when I’m in the car), start breathing deeply, and say, “Lord, I surrender everything and everyone to you.” My mind will start throwing distractions at me, and the enemy of my soul certainly will, but as things come to mind, I keep repeating, “Lord, I surrender everything and everyone to you.” Over time, the Lord will start giving you a clear mind. Tell him how you feel about him, then ask him to reveal his love for you.
Training yourself to take advantage of these small moments is like running. You don’t start by running for an hour. You start with five or ten minutes, then build up to twenty. It’s the same thing-start off slow and build up. You’ll find it’s much easier to fall into it once you’ve built the habit.
Once you have trained yourself to take advantage of the little moments, and you’re ready to expand them. Take a longer walk or run, drive the longer way home, take a bath instead of a shower, get up a little earlier, walk to the meeting instead of driving, or just go to a coffee shop empty-handed or with nothing but a journal. Over time, the cumulative effect of taking advantage of these moments will be a greater inner peace that pushes into your day, a deeper awareness of God’s presence, and an increased ability to hear his voice.
It helps to have a quiet place. I have a leather chair in my study; once I sink into it, I sink into silence and solitude. If there’s a special place outdoors, weather permitting, that’s even better—God will often speak through creation.
At some point, you may be ready for a silent retreat, whether a morning, a day, or a weekend. I spend a morning a month in silence and solitude and in prayer on behalf of our school. These times involve stillness, reading, journaling, and prayer. Sometimes, I’ve fallen asleep during these times. I used to feel guilty about falling asleep, like Jesus’ disciples in the garden. My mentor gave me the best counsel ever: “how could your Father be more overjoyed than to have you be so relaxed in his presence that you fall asleep in his arms?”
A retreat may be the time you consider your life goals and purposes. But your retreats don’t always have to be that ambitious. You don’t have to read seven books or come away with an epiphany, any more than date night with your wife or husband has to end with mad professions of your love for each other or a commitment to reordering the whole course of your married life. Sometimes, it’s just about being together, so don’t put pressure on yourself.
Finally, practicing the Sabbath is an excellent discipline for cultivating the silence necessary to hear God. This is so because you’re making a weekly decision to step aside from distraction. As Pete Grieg notes, you may struggle to hear God now because you are neglecting the Sabbath. I did for years, and it undermined my ability to hear God’s voice. If you take that day, whichever it is, and make it, as Grieg says, joyful, slow, analog, and nonnegotiable, you will slow down and hear God. What a great practice to weave into your family!
The greatest gift you can give the people you lead, your children, your spouse, and your community, is a heart in the process of continual transformation into the image of Christ. Your Father encourages you to “be still, and know that I am God.” (Ps. 46:10). He wants to change you into that image, but he needs you to slow down enough to catch up to him.
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