How To Practice Silence And Solitude When You're Too Busy
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I wanna show you something this morning. I wonder if you could put your hand out flat in front of you and hold it as still as you possibly can. Now imagine your hand is in, on the surface of a pool of water. What do you see in the water around your hand? Does anyone want to call out to me? Ripples, possibly.
If it's perfectly still, I wonder if we would just see a reflection of what's above it. In my pool at home, that's usually just the blue sky. Now, when you shake it in the water... I think there's a video here. So yeah, when we stir it, when we shake it, when we drop something into it, we see ripples, distortion, fragments, and sometimes even nothing if it's stirred a lot.
I wanna say today that Pastor Kev talked last week about mirror, and he talked a lot about what that mirror looks like in our lives. And today I wanna talk about what busyness does to the mirror of our lives. It doesn't destroy the water when we drop something into it. It just makes it impossible to read.
And I want to pose this morning that we're actually living, in our lives today, in permanently stirred water, and we're wondering why we can't see clearly. So
let me tell you what this looks like on an everyday, maybe a Tuesday. When your alarm goes off at 6:00 AM, I don't know if you do this, but you roll over and hit snooze. I always hit snooze. I envy the people who can just get up out of bed. I'm not a morning person. I do everything the night before so that I can just get through the morning and get where I need to go.
But your alarm goes off at 6:00 AM. Before your eyes are fully open, you've hit snooze, but you don't really go back to sleep. You might roll over, pick up your phone, swipe up, open that thing, check for, what does Instagram say this morning? What's the weather going to be today? What work emails came in overnight?
Before your feet have even touched the floor, you have allowed, perhaps, the outrage of 50 different people and the demands of life to enter your mind, and it is causing stirred water. So you then get up out of bed, you put the phone in the bathroom, you get into the shower, but instead of just being in that space, you are thinking through the argument you think you're going to have with your boss at 10:00 AM.
Or you-- Then, when you go to make coffee, you stand at the coffee machine in the kitchen, and you're scrolling on social media, and you are taking in even more opinions and events of the day. Maybe it's the news for you. You get into the car. You-- The moment you start the car, your phone Bluetooths to the fancy car that you're driving, and it straightaway brings up the podcast that you half-listened to on the way home from work yesterday, and it's blaring.
When we stop at the lights, hopefully, we're not reaching for our phone and scrolling notifications. But maybe you think, "I didn't send that text message." So you say, "Hey, Siri, send- Kevin a text message and tell him, and you're straightaway processing the things you think you forgot to do last night. So by that time, we've maybe been awake 45 minutes or an hour, and we have not had a single second of quiet.
Our lives are not just stirred with the water, they're actually boiling So I wanna be honest with you. This message about silence and solitude, when Kev said to me, "You're up for that one," I was like, "No, I'm not. I don't get any silence or solitude." He said, "That's why you're the best one to sh- speak it." Seriously, this-- today, while I'm sharing, I was so challenged, especially the week that we've had.
I think that we did, from Sunday through to Wednesday, we worked eight AM to eight PM if we were lucky, and then the other nights were nearly ten o'clock, full days during this conference. And then I'm up here this morning talking to you about silence and solitude. So I actually feel quite frayed, and oh my goodness, I hope what I've got to share will settle.
But I also hope that because of that, what I share this morning will be relatable. Because I feel like most of you are in a similar place in your life, whatever that looks like, where you're feeling often stretched and busy and stirred with the water. So this morning, I hope some of what I share will land with you and you can take some practical things that you can actually apply to your life.
So we live in a world that has declared war on silence. Think about it. When was the last time that you genuinely had a moment of quiet that you didn't immediately fill with something? I'm guilty of this. If I'm sitting quiet, I think, "What should I be doing? I need to get this done, or I need to get that done."
We wake up, we reach for our phone, we drive with a podcast on. We have constant noise. Maybe you're a parent. Actually, Mike said something interesting this morning to me about these earplugs that he's got, and he said he needs them for work. But some-- He said, "Sometimes I put them in at home, and it just takes the noise out of the kids."
I'm like, "Yes." So maybe you're a parent, and you have that constant chatter. You're in that season where the kids need you, or they wanna share their lives with you, which is a blessing, but also makes it really hard to settle and have that moment of quiet. From the moment we open our eyes, most of us have an unbroken stream of constant noise and input, and we've reframed this as productivity or efficiency.
"I'm more efficient because I have this." And technology has enabled us to plug in and access things that we maybe wouldn't have been able to do twenty years ago. But here's what's actually happening with the noise. So maybe you are using that noise in your life, and it has become a local anesthetic for the soul We use constant noise perhaps to numb ourselves and to put a plug over what's actually happening deep in our soul.
When we are quiet, it exposes questions for us "Am I really okay? Why did that person say that to me yesterday?" We start to think, "What if my business doesn't survive the year?" Another question could be, "Why do I feel so lonely even though I'm in a room full of people?" I wonder if that's you this morning.
You've come this morning to a family gathering, we call it here, part of the spiritual family, and you've plugged in, but you have a deep loneliness in your soul, yet there's a room full of people. I've had many conversations with people who have shared that, and when you have a moment of quiet, it starts to dig away at those questions.
Another one would be, am I actually making a difference with my life, or am I just running on a hamster wheel? That's something I reflect on often. Am I making a difference? Is it-- Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing enough? Am I just running on that constant hamster wheel? The uncomfortable truth for many of us is that the busyness isn't accidental because when the water goes still, it forces us to look at some truths about our lives and feelings we haven't processed or tensions we've been avoiding or questions we've been outrunning.
Silence doesn't create those problems, but it stops us from hiding them. Most of us are not avoiding silence because we're busy. We're staying busy because we're avoiding the silence. So I'm gonna say that again. Most of us are not avoiding silence because we're busy. We're staying busy because we're avoiding the silence.
We're keeping ourselves in a permanent state of distortion, stirred water, so that we don't have to face the things that come up when we sit in silence We wonder why we feel so disconnected from God. I want to look at some scripture this morning and see what God has to say about this topic of silence and solitude.
So before this series started Pastor Kev spoke a single message called First Things First. If you didn't get to catch that one, I would encourage you to go back and have a listen to it. He talked about the rhythm of rest and starting your day right before it actually begins. So it's a whole topic in itself, but it sets up this series of Mirror.
So just make a little mental note of that one to circle back around if you didn't get to catch it. I wanna read from Mark 1:32-35. So Mark is one of Jesus' disciples, and he's the author of the Gospel of Mark. So there's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are Gospels that are in the New Testament part of our Bible, and Mark gives us one of the most striking glimpses into the rhythm of Jesus' daily life.
He had-- Jesus, at that time, had probably the busiest day on record. He had been teaching in the synagogue, casting out a demon, healing Peter's mother, spending the entire day healing every sick person that was brought to him. It was relentless. So this verse comes after all of that has happened. If you wanna read it in context, you could read the whole chapter and the story of what actually took place prior to it.
But this is Mark 1:32-35. It says, "That evening, after sunset, the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons." Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went off to a solitary place where He prayed.
So notice what Mark is showing us in that scripture is the whole town was gathered at the door. Everyone was there shouting, "Jesus, talk to me. Jesus, I wanna show you something. Jesus, can you do this?" Can you relate? Probably not to the kind of things that He was being asked to do, but maybe you can relate to the constant calling of your name.
The demand was real, and the needs were legitimate, and Jesus, the Son of God, who po- possessed all power and all wisdom and could do anything in a moment, He got up before dawn, walked away from that crowd, and went to find silence. So this wasn't a crisis response. This i- this wasn't something Jesus did in that moment once.
It was actually part of the rhythm of His life. In Luke 5:16, it tells us that Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. Often, repeatedly, as a pattern, not when the schedule allowed, not when the demands eased off, but right in the middle of the craziness, He withdrew, and He went, and He sat in silence before the Father We have recorded in the New Testament something like 37 miracles in the Gospels, those four books.
We also repeatedly see Jesus leaving the crowd. He's walking away from opportunities to do more, to say more, and he is leaving the needs temporarily unmet in those spaces so that he could go and be alone with the Father. The Son of God believed that solitude was so essential, he was willing to disappoint people in order to protect it.
Some of us need to hear that this morning because we are on a wheel of pleasing people, and that, that's me. I can often be about making the, the people happy, but I need to reframe my thinking around what is-- what does love require of me around what Jesus wants for my life, and frame it around what makes God happy.
And what makes him happy is when we are with him, when we have relationship with him. So sometimes we need to leave the needs temporarily unmet. It doesn't mean if a person's bleeding out in front of you, you don't help them. It means that if you have-- you have to have discernment in the moment to think, "What is urgent?
What need can I leave temporarily unmet so that I can refuel, refill, and sit at the Father's feet?" So why did Jesus do this? It was because he was living from the Father. So I w- I could have gone right down a rabbit hole of the vine and the branches and being with him. There's a story in scripture that talks about that being together with God and how we go about doing that.
I don't have time to unpack all of that this morning, but I'm just gonna say Jesus was living from the Father, and living from the Father required staying connected to him He wasn't just managing a busy ministry, he was maintaining a clear reflection. If we look at the Psalms, and I was-- I've been doing a lot-- When I read the scripture, I try and see who wrote it, wh-who did they write it for, and what was the context around it.
And the Psalms were often written by Solomon, but this particular Psalm 46. And it was interesting to me 'cause last night when I hit the pillow late, I opened my Bible app, and the verse of the day yesterday was out of this Psalm. He says, "Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations.
I will be exalted in the earth." And this Psalm was written by the sons of Korah. If you were around in the '90s, you would know there was a band called the Sons of Korah, so all I can hear is their music in my head. But basically, they were a levi- a family of Levitical musicians and temple singers.
So that was their job. They actually got to-- So musicians as a job, something to do, was some-something in Bible times, that was their actual job, was to lead worship in the temple. People had to go there to experience the presence of God. I find it so amazing that now we get, in the New Covenant, to carry the presence of God with us.
But back in those times, people had to make a trip and go to the place where the worship was in the temple so they could experience God's presence. Here's the thing about Psalm 46, though. If you read the whole Psalm, this verse, "Be still and know that I am God," was not written in a tranquil, quiet meadow.
They weren't having a picnic and that Psalm came out of that. It was actually, the earth is giving way, the mountains are slipping into the sea, the ocean is roaring, nations are in chaos, and kingdoms are falling. It is in absolute crisis that this Psalm was written, right in the middle of the storm, and God said to be still.
Stillness isn't the reward we get after everything in our lives has settled. Stillness is the practice of what makes it possible to know God, even in the middle of the chaos And that's something I've had to-- I'm a person who likes to get all the things done and then have a rest. If you are wired that way, maybe it's a Type A personality trait.
I can't really rest on the couch when the dishes are in the sink. It bothers me. But this is what this is saying, that we actually need to be still and know that He is God, and be able to rest in the midst of the chaos, and that's what this psalm unpacks. So I'm gonna say again what I just said. Stillness isn't the reward you get after everything settles down.
It's the practice that makes it possible to know God in the midst of the chaos. If you look throughout church history, there are lots of believers who stood firm in times of chaos, and there were ones who anchored themselves in silence. And when I was looking into this and doing a bit of research, I found-- I came across a guy called Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
I wonder if anyone's heard of him. Yeah, there's a lot of quotes around. But he was-- In the 1930s, World War II it was in the midst of World War II Germany was falling into the dark horrors of the Nazi rule, and most of the church was compromising. They were staying quiet to protect themselves. They were actively aligning with Hitler.
And Bonhoeffer helped to establish an underground illegal seminary for young pastors who, It was in a place, a small village called Finkenwalde. I'm probably not say- pronouncing it if you're German, sorry. To train young pastors who would stand against the Nazi regime. So it was very fascinating.
There's actually a short documentary on his life and it talks about how he was raised. He was raised in a wealthy home where very few of the women in that time, in the early 1900s, had the privilege of being educated, but his mother was. So his mum went to university and studied to be a teacher, and his dad was in science and was a scientist and worked in that field.
So he came from a background of wealth and privilege. He chose, as he was growing up, to study theology. He went to seminary at, I think it was the University of Berlin, and studied theology and wanted to do that with i- with his life. His parents did not approve. They didn't love that for him. They wanted him to be educated and make a difference.
His-- He was an accomplished musician, played beautifully. They thought he would do something with music. He ended up in pastoral work. And that's a little bit of a background. I won't share too much more. But if you're interested in that, have a look at his life and how it played out for him. But the pressure he was under was immense in this season, in the 1930s.
The Gestapo was hunting them. The world was on fire. And he had this small group of pastors, young pastors, who had all said they would stand against the Nazi regime. And one of the things that he mandated for these young pastors to do in this seminary environment was reading 30 minutes of complete unbroken silent-- The, Reading the scripture and spending 30 minutes of complete unbroken silence just in reflection.
No talking, no writing notes, no studying commentary, just sitting alone in absolute silence before God. The young students actually rebelled against him at first and said, "Dietrich, we are in a war and a battle for our nation's soul. We do not have time." Have you heard this before? "We do not have time to sit quiet and do nothing."
I say that to myself sometimes. You do not have time to sit down and do nothing. You're busy. You've got things to do. So they argued with him and said, "We don't have time for this," but he knew. Bonhoeffer actually wrote to them and said, "Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech."
Sorry
All right. So this quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer serves as a warning about the relationship between solitude and community. I'm just gonna say the start of that quote again. It is, "Let him who cannot be alone beware of community." It took me a while when I read that thinking, "What is he talking about?" But I think that sentence means that if we are not comfortable being alone in silence, we are likely using community and busyness as a distraction or escape from facing the things that we need to face ourselves.
The second part of the quote is, "Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech." This describes a necessary rhythm, how meaningful, thoughtful words are born out of the heart that has been quieted and reflected upon
In short, Bonhoeffer is suggesting that for a community of people to be effective, we have to first do the interior work of our soul so that what we bring to community contributes. We don't bring a stirred up soul. I don't know if you've ever been in a small group or a, a life group, a village we call it here, where someone comes in-- Maybe you've got a group that's been together for a while, you have an established community, and it's quite peaceful and calm, and someone comes in and they're stirred up, and it just messes with the dynamic of the group a little bit.
I think that's what he is talking about here, that unless we do the interior work of being settled and being alone with God and allowing God to work on that in our lives, we can come in and cause chaos. He knew-- So Bonhoeffer knew when he told these men, "You need to spend time in silence and solitude," he knew that if he sent those men out into the storm of Nazi Germany and what was happening at the time with stirred up, anxious and frantic souls, that they would crumble under the pressure.
They needed silence to let the water settle so that they could see clearly enough to stand within the Nazi regime or against the Nazi regime. If Bonhoeffer needed intentional silence while resisting Adolf Hitler, we certainly need it in navigating our weekly schedules as well. We can't really compare the pressures of the time in a war to our personal daily lives, but we can learn from some of the principles that they talk about.
Imagine two pools of water side by side, and Kev showed us this photo last week. Both of them have the same sky above them, the same sun, the same clouds, but one of them has stones constantly being dropped into it, causing ripples, and the other is perfectly still. Only one of them reflects the sky above, and one of them is just in turmoil.
Both pools are under the exact same sky, and both pools are in the sun's presence, but only one receives and displays the reflection clearly. You're not absent from God when life is busy. Thank goodness, 'cause otherwise I would be absent. Under the new covenant of Jesus, we are in His presence always, but you may be absent from the reflection
If our life is too stirred to show what's above, the reflection of who God is, we may have to consider that we have to spend some time in silence and solitude. Can I just say, though, that silence and solitude is not about earning quiet time with God Under the new covenant, as I said, we are always already in His presence.
This practice is about removing the disturbance that keeps us from receiving what's already there. So God is there. He's nearer than the air we breathe. The scripture talks about that. He is in, around us always. If we ha- if we know Jesus personally, we carry the Holy Spirit within us to help guide, lead, and carry us.
But maybe when we're stirred, we can't see clearly, and we don't get that reflection. And I wonder for you what comes to the surface when the water is settled. Sometimes it's peace. Sometimes you could sit, and it will bring a peaceful settling, and you'll sense peace. Sometimes it's a conviction of something you've been avoiding.
Sometimes it's clarity around a decision that you've been paralyzed over. Sometimes it's the simple, deep awareness that God knows you and loves you. But none of that realization is accessible when the water is stirred. We have to make time for that peaceful settling so that we can basically have the reflection of God in our lives.
I've had that experience many times where I have run away from what God is doing in my life by creating busyness because I wasn't ready to deal with it. Have you had that experience where you think, 'I know there's something I need to deal with, but I'm not ready for that, so I'll just be busy over here and put that to the side'?
And God is gracious with us. He does give us room to do that. He will not push. He will always be a gentleman and allow us to deal with things in our own time. But when we do make space for that quiet reflection and have the ability to rest and really hear from God about how He wants us to deal with it, it can make it a lot easier.
So let me ask you an honest question, and maybe you can just answer in your mind today. How much genuine silence do you have in your life right now? Not quiet background noise, actual silence, intentional stillness, and moments when the water gets to settle. For most of us, including me, the honest answer is almost none.
And what that means in practice is that I'm often running on a reflection that I haven't looked at recently. I'm navigating life from an interior map that might be months old. Maybe the last time I got to have silence was months ago, or in some cases, even years ago And it's out of date. And as I said, God is gracious.
I often think in the season of parenthood when my kids were really little and there was not a lot of time for anything and you feel a bit frantic, that I was so grateful for the years of devotions and scripture and so-- that I packed into my life, into the well of my life, because I was able to draw on that in those moments when I felt like I never got a spare minute to read the Bible.
So yeah, I would encourage you young people, youth, pack it in 'cause it does really, it does in-- it carries you through all the seasons of your life when you can learn that stuff when you're young. You might feel busy as a young person, and I would say you are busier than we were as young people because of all of the things.
But as you get older, life heaps on the pressures and responsibilities, and it, it's important to have that of the s- the word of God packed into your life to draw upon. In saying that, it's also important to create space for silence and solitude to be able to have a fresh reflection of who God is.
We've been so busy filling the quiet that we haven't noticed that the quiet was trying to show us something. So here's what I want to invite you to this week And I wanna be clear, this is not a religious practice or an obligation to guilt you. It's actually a gift. And I said to Ruth yesterday in the chaos of, oh, it's been a week, and I think I've got it together, but I'm not sure, and I actually thought I better practice what I was gonna preach on yesterday.
So I'm just being real, people. I did it only yesterday, the 15 minutes. So yesterday when I woke up, I-- Dexter's soccer game wasn't till 12:30. Yay. On a Saturday, that's a win. So I got to have a bit more of a slow morning. So when my alarm went off, I didn't reach for my phone 'cause I knew I was preaching this.
I was like we've gotta try it." Just going to lay there, and I want to encourage you to do this week. Maybe for you it's the night before because your house is quiet the night before. If you have small children, I know that the quiet time is often when you put them to bed at night. So have 15 minutes.
It's a gift of 15 minutes, one block. Try doing it either before your day starts or the night before. The First Things First message talks about that, the evening and morning rhythm, that your day actually starts the night before. If we can get into that rhythm of preparing our heart and mind, that our day starts the night before for the next day.
Find a quiet room, a back deck, a park bench. No phone in your hand, no podcast in your ears, no worship music in the background. Just you and God in the silence. And when you do this, the first one to four minutes is the racing of your brain. I didn't do that thing. I need some milk. I've gotta do the shopping list.
What have I gotta do later today? All of the things. Maybe writing it down for you helps. I know some people who keep a notebook next to their bed 'cause they can't go to sleep, so they just mind dump everything onto the notebook, and that helps the brain to think it's time for sleep now." Maybe that works for you.
Everyone's different. We need to find the rhythm that works for us, but if that works in the first one to four minutes to get it out, you do that. Minutes five to nine, the internal noise might turn to anxiety or discomfort and make you feel uneasy because you're not used to that quiet. And maybe some unprocessed feelings will come up.
And then in minutes 10 to 15, the last five minutes, if you stay and you don't pick up your phone and you just settle and the water settles, and the surface might begin to clear It might give you a good reflection of what God is trying to say to you, and you might hear that still, small whisper. God is always talking to us.
We are not always listening. Depends on where our mind is at and where our heart is at. When your mind wanders to your task list, you don't have to beat yourself up about it or throw in the towel. Just gently drop back, take a deep breath, and try and refocus on that quiet. The question isn't whether God is speaking, the question is whether the water is still enough for us to be able to hear.
So here's what I think a church community practicing silence and solitude looks like. It doesn't look like a bunch of people sitting in a room silently together. That would be weird. Although I did think about that this morning. Earlier in the week when I hadn't quite finished writing the whole message, I thought, "What if we just sat for 15 minutes?
That'd be all right." That'd be weird, yeah. I might-- I think we might go to sleep. It doesn't look like people sitting quietly. It looks like people who show up to their village group or their life group that week with something really deep to share because you've spent the time hearing from God Because people have spent-- you've spent time with God in the week, and maybe the thing that God whispers to you in that moment of silence is not for you.
Maybe it's for someone else. And that's the joy of community as well, of being in community and accountability and doing life with others, is sometimes God gives you the seed of what someone else needs in their walk. It looks like someone's saying, "Something surfaced in my quiet time this week, and I realized that I've been avoiding something and I need help to walk through it."
It produces community doing the real interior work rather than just performing the exterior work of Christianity. And I wanna take a moment to give the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality course a little bit of a plug here, because that's what that course looks at. So if you have heard of EHS, or we've talked about EHS a fair bit, it's an actual course that you can do here or you can do within your village group.
It's always better done in community because you can reflect off each other and share. But it talks about you cannot be emotionally-- You cannot be spiritually healthy without being emotionally healthy. They go together. So we have to deal with the stuff in the well of our lives so that we can be spiritually healthy people.
At our church, as Kev has already said today, our top value is being spirit-led, so that's the kind of church we wanna build here. And the church is not the building, it's not the gathering, it's each person sitting in this place together. We are the church. The church is not something we go to, it's something we carry with us, and we go and be out in the community, connecting with people.
And when we can take that still reflection of being with Jesus out to the world, that's where we can really make a difference. We wanna be a community of people where we are genuinely letting the water settle and bringing that clear reflection of who God is to each other. Our city doesn't need more noise.
It doesn't need more things to do or more things to focus on. It's already swimming in all of that. What it needs is a gathering of people who have learned to be still and can extend that stillness to a world that is full of distraction. And this is especially important for our young people. I feel like modeling to them a world where they can, amidst all of the noise and everything that they are facing, they can settle and really connect with who God is to guide and lead them.
I've been doing a lot of thinking in the parenting world about protecting our kids from all of the things out there, and it's just not possible to do. But what we can do is instill in them how to walk with Jesus, how to be with him, how to spend time in silence and solitude and hear his still small voice, to equip them for the things we have no idea how to equip them for.
The Holy Spirit does, though, and if they can carry the Holy Spirit with them, they will know what's right and what's not right. We don't have to strive to be setting rules and saying, "Do this and don't do that." We can just trust the Holy Spirit in them to carry them, to guide and lead them So let's be that kind of people, let's be that kind of church that lets the water settle, and let's do it together.
Stillness isn't laziness. It's actually how we learn to see. I'm gonna invite the team up to, They're gonna s- play some music for us. I thought maybe sitting in silence at the end of our message today would be a bit too much. We might go to sleep. But we are going to have a moment. I think you did it actually earlier when Pastor Kev encouraged you to think of the people you were praying for today.
We're just going to, at the end of the message spend a few moments workshopping, just sitting quietly and see what the Lord says to you. On the back of your seat is a QR code and you- we've used Slido a lot here to put our thoughts up. I'm not going to post the Slido to the screens because it's for you personally, but if you did, after the moment of quiet, want to record what is God saying to me or whispering on that Slido, just to give us an idea of how this message landed with you today, we would love you to do that Did you wanna come up?
Did you want me to just wrap up? Looking at the time. Okay. So we-- Yeah, I'm just gonna get... If you can just play for us before we sing, just quietly, and then we'll go into a song. Megs has, and the team, have prepared this song, We're Gonna Make Room, and I think that's what today is about. It's about us making room for God and just having a moment to sit and think, 'Lord, what is it that you wanna say to me today?'
And I pray that as you go this week, that you can take that challenge of the 15 minutes. And I would love to hear if you're able to do it, spend the 15 minutes with God, and what it feels like for you. And if you have kids, encouraging them to learn to sit as well. 15 minutes might be too long, but just a minute.
I love to say to my kids, "What's God saying to you today?" And often they go, "Nothing. I don't know. Nothing." But it's that prompting of, "Hey, God's saying something. Have you heard it?" Yeah, I just encourage you also to take the practice of the 15 minutes and try and work it into the rhythm and routine of your life.
I'm just gonna pray, and then we'll sit for a moment, allow God to speak to you, and then after a moment, Megs will lead us in a song. Father God, I just thank you for your presence. Holy Spirit, that you are close, that you're near, and when we can still the water to see your face, Lord, that you will speak.
So Father, I just pray for each person in this room here today, and those watching online, Lord, that you will reach into our heart and mind, and Lord, that we would hear the still, small voice the overflow of your love for us, Lord, and that it's a reflection that we can carry into our week and a practice that we can put in place to help us in our relationship with you And to help us connect to others who don't yet know you.
Father, I just thank you. I thank you for the practice of solitude and for the discipline of silence. Lord, help us to apply it to our everyday lives. We thank you in Jesus' name