The Calm Before the Storm

Now that the weather is turning warmer and the sun sets later in the evening, picture yourself sitting on your back porch on a nice spring evening enjoying a glass of wine while listening to the birds sing, the breeze gently whistling through the leaves, and the clapboards on the old barn down the lane creaking. It is lovely and relaxing evening. Suddenly everything goes quiet. It gets eerily calm; the birds stop singing, the leaves are no longer rustling, and the clapboards hang silently. Lightning flashes in the sky. Soon a storm does appear on the horizon, dumping buckets on rain on what was just a few minutes ago a nice peaceful evening.

The atmosphere does truly change before a storm. Storm clouds pull in warm moist air from all around as the storm builds. This air travels up through the clouds and then back down again. On the way down this air becomes warmer and drier, and as warm stable air spreads over an area it makes the rest of the air stable as well, thus the “calm before the storm.”

This calmness, this stillness, often brings us a period of tranquility, a sense of peace. There is peace in stillness. The Bible talks of us finding peace in our moments of stillness. Your body needs down time to rest and re-charge, and your soul needs times of silence and quietness, a time to quiet all other sounds, in order to hear God’s voice. God sometimes speaks in loud tones, but most often He speaks to us in gentle whispers (see 1 Kings 19:9-12).

In a world full of noise, it is really hard to hear God’s voice if you do not build times into your daily routine to dial down and simply be at rest. Psalm 46:10 tells us that we are to “be still and know that I am God.” And among other things, Isaiah 30:15 tells us that “in quietness and trust is your strength.”      

Just as that quiet falls upon nature, we too need to allow a quiet to fall upon our lives. If you want to hear God, you need to build into your life a rhythm of silence and quietness.

So, I ask you today, are you intentionally building times of silence and quietness into your schedule?