Silence and Solitude...

So today has been an interesting day for me. Really up and down.... In the end though I learned something about myself that God defiantly wanted me to know. Josh asked us to pick a spiritual discipline and write a short summary about it and how we can use it in our lives. At first I thought that I would take the easy way out and pull out "An Invitation to a Journey" and use what it has in there about the disciplines of silence and solitude. Good idea right? I really should have known better because in the last few weeks I cant begin to tell you how much this subject has come up here. So apparently I was meant to get a lot more out of it than I originally thought.

As I sat down to write some notes about the subject this morning I could not concentrate. I had a lot of things on my mind and some issues that I needed to work out and as much as I really wanted to research this and get it done, I couldn’t. So I decided that I needed to get out of the house and find a quiet place to do it. So with "An Invitation to a Journey", my Bible, and a notebook off I went to the gazebo. When I got there I was completely overwhelmed with the view of Jarabacoa, (never having been to this spot since I got here), that all I could do was sit there and look out on in. All I needed to take really was my Bible…

I did this for and hour and a half, just sitting up there praying and thinking about my time here and all the stuff that I had on my mind, all the stuff that had been the original reason for getting out of the house. Again I should have known better. I really learned up there what silence and solitude is all about. I am not the type of person who likes to be by myself. I would much rather be in a room full of people just so that I have someone around me. Being silent on the other hand is not one of my many problems. Most people would say that I am a relatively quiet person. But together these two disciplines can have the effect that only God can bring upon. And I learned that today sitting up in that gazebo...

Well after all of that intenseness up there I really needed some girl talk and so I enlisted Beth to help me out with this and it was perfect. We were able to really talk, something that I really haven’t had since I got here and something that it turns out that we both really needed. God had been putting it on both of our hearts today which just shows how awesome He really is.

Silence and Solitude, although they can really mean a lot for a lot of different people I found mine today. And even though I still have a long way to making it truly my own I think that that is the whole purposes God intended for these disciplines. Lamentations 3:25-28 says "The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young. Let him sit alone in silence, for the Lord has laid it on him." Sit alone in silence...

So in solitude, which I now understand better, we are being forced to let go and let God. I was reading in "An Invitation to a Journey" and found this about silence, "Silence is bringing ourselves to a point of relinquishing to God our control for our relationship with God. Silence is a reversal of the whole possessing, controlling, grasping dynamic of trying to maintain control for our own existence. Silence is the inner act of letting go." Reading this again today put a whole new aspect on the subject, and reminds me that I need to continue to let God be in control of my life. Because when I take control nothing ever goes right and it gets all bottled up inside to where I cant function anymore, which is exactly what happened today. Put together Silence and Solitude are really all about letting God take control of every aspect of your life and letting Him be there for us in our brokenness, and being a light in our darkness. For everyone it is different and we all have to find what it means for us to be silent before God and find solitude in Him.

So in a matter of speaking I did get my assignment done today but I learned so much more in the process. On another note, we have a new team here after being without one for a couple weeks. They seem really cool. There is a high school group here form Florida and coming latter tonight is a college group from James Madison University. Not going to lie I really do like it when there are no teams here only because I get a lot of down time to reflect and just be in Gods presents, but I think this is going to be good for me this week just to get back in the grove of things. So once again, here we go!