Keeping Silence

“When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” – Revelation 8:1

“The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.” – Habakkuk 2:20

We made sparkle jars over the weekend by filling a glass jar with water, a bit of detergent, a few drops of food coloring, and lots of glitter and sequins. You just shake up the jar and watch the sparkles swirl around before slowing settling on the bottom, an activity the kids found endlessly fascinating.

Sometimes our souls, or our lives, are like those jars, full of swirling sediment which only time can settle. “Just as the physical law of gravity ensures that sediment swirling in a jar of muddy river water will eventually settle and the water will become clear,” writes Ruth Haley Barton, “so the spiritual law of gravity ensures that the chaos of the human soul will settle if it sits still long enough.” We don’t have to do anything but sit quietly in God’s presence, “anything but show up and trust the spiritual law of gravity that says, ‘Be still, and the knowing will come.’”

John describes two things, and only two things, which the seventh seal brings: silence, and time. These are rare commodities in our house right now. Silence is non-existent: there is always someone talking, sometimes everyone talking. There are simultaneous zoom calls, multiple voices shouting in play (for some reason their imaginative play always involves very enthusiastic sounds). And my time is not my own. There’s always the potential of being interrupted to meet needs or handle issues. 

We need now, more than ever, to keep silence. We live noisy lives. And we are used to meeting problems with activity, meeting busyness with more busyness. But there is a kind of truth that can only be declared, a kind of clarity that can only be experienced, through sitting quietly without doing or saying a thing. Our silence is a stopping to acknowledge that God sits in His holy temple. Our silence is an invitation to allow the Holy Spirit to work in and reveal to us what He may. “I believe that silence is the most challenging, the most needed and the least experienced spiritual discipline among evangelical Christians today,” writes Barton. May we not fail to keep our silence, on earth as it is in heaven.