The Quiet Is the Worst Part

Della moved into the place on Ridge Road in April, and the first night she left the truck radio playing out in the yard with the door open because the house was so quiet she could hear her own ears.

She is thirty-one. She grew up in a house with nine people in it and lived in one with six until the spring, and the details of why she left are hers and are not the point. Everybody agrees she was right. Her aunt drove two hours to help her move and cried in the yard about how proud she was.

Here is what nobody told her.

The house on Ridge Road has three rooms and a porch and it is hers. It has no television. She has a radio she leaves on all night, every night, tuned to a station out of the county seat that plays farm reports at four in the morning, and she does not listen to it, and she cannot sleep without it.

She has started doing the dishes at odd hours because running water is a sound.

If you asked her what is wrong she would say nothing is wrong, and she would mean it. Nothing is wrong. That is exactly the problem and she does not have language for it. In the old house something was always wrong, and something being wrong is loud, and she spent twenty-nine years with her ears full, and now there is a kitchen at nine in the evening with nothing in it and she cannot be in the room.

Here is the evening it caught.

Her cousin stayed over, first visitor since the move, and in the morning said, at the sink, cheerfully, "How do you sleep out here? It's so peaceful."

And Della said, "Yeah. It's great."

And her cousin said, "I'd love it."

And Della washed the same cup twice and did not say the thing, which is that she has slept about four hours a night since April, and that the peaceful is the reason.

You know that stretch. Out of somewhere loud, correctly out, and what is left is a quiet that everybody else would call a blessing and that you cannot sit down inside.

Found in a howling waste

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you how long this lasts. I do not know. I am not going to tell you what your old house was, or hand you a verdict on anybody in it. And I am not going to tell you to be thankful for the quiet, because the thankfulness is already there, and being told to be thankful for a thing a person cannot tolerate is one of the loneliest experiences anybody can have in a church.

What I will do is read you one line out of the song Moses sang at the end of his life, because of the two things it puts side by side.

He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.Deuteronomy 32:10

A waste howling wilderness. That is the setting. Not a garden. Not a resting place. The wildest, emptiest, least habitable phrase the Hebrew has.

And what does He do there? Four verbs, and I want you to notice that none of them is removed.

He found. He led about. He instructed. He kept.

You are somewhere God is described as finding people rather than as avoiding them, and the emptiness of the place has never been an obstacle to Him. Deuteronomy 32:10 puts the finding in the waste itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a kitchen at nine in the evening with the radio on.

And that third phrase, he led him about. The Hebrew is closer to he encircled him. It is a word about going all the way round something. Not steering it from in front. Surrounding it.

Which is a strange and specific comfort for a person whose trouble is that there is nothing in the room. The image is not of God filling the room with noise. It is of God being all the way around the edges of it.

You have been encircled through every one of these quiet evenings, and the encircling is what the verse describes rather than a filling of the silence. It is written that He led him about and kept him as the apple of His eye, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient surrounding a present one.

Peaceful is not the same as safe

Now let me be careful, because a message like this could hurt somebody badly if it got clumsy.

I am not going to tell Della that the quiet is God's gift and she should learn to enjoy it. She may come to enjoy it. It may become the best thing about the house. But telling somebody in month five that the thing they cannot bear is a blessing they are failing to appreciate is not ministry, it is just a nicer way of saying the problem is them.

Here is what is actually happening in that kitchen. For twenty-nine years, sound meant information. Sound told her where everybody was and what kind of evening it was going to be. Silence, in that house, was the thing that came before something. A body that learned that does not hear peace when a room goes quiet. It hears the pause.

You are not failing to appreciate anything, and there is nothing in Scripture that makes a person's comfort level the measure of God's provision. Deuteronomy 32:10 has the keeping happening in a place explicitly called a howling waste, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a hard setting from being read as a verdict on the person in it.

And here is the other thing worth naming, because it is the sneaky one. Della cannot tell her cousin. Not because her cousin would be unkind, but because the sentence the peaceful is the reason I cannot sleep sounds, out loud, like a person complaining about being safe. And so she says it is great, and washes a cup twice, and the loneliness of that is worse than the silence.

You are allowed to say the true sentence out loud even though it sounds strange, and the psalms are full of people saying stranger things to God than that. Psalm 142:2 has a man pouring out his complaint before Him and showing Him his trouble, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an odd-sounding honesty safe.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If four hours a night has been going on since April, that is worth telling a doctor plainly, because sleep is physical and this is not only a matter of the heart. And if the evenings have gone somewhere darker than restless, do not sit with that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your aunt, your cousin, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about your old house. That is me refusing to leave you in that kitchen by yourself.