It is almost 10:00, Monday night. The children are snoozing and snoring upstairs (or they should be!). Aside from a few outside noises--a passing car . . . a barking dog . . . a few, faint voices in the distance--all's quiet on the home front. That wonderful, much-needed presence has again come for a visit--quietness. Oh, how I love it . . . how I need it.
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One of my most poignant memories of quietness occurred in California when I was walking with a friend along the sandy shores at Carmel. The silence of that early dawn was broken only by the rhythmic roar of the rolling surf and the cry of a few gulls floating overhead. The same thought I had then I have now: I cannot be the man I should be without times of quietness. Stillness is an essential part of our growing deeper as we grow older. Or--in the words of a man who helped shape my life perhaps more than any other:
We will not become men of God without the presence of solitude.
Those words haunt me when I get caught in the treadmill of time schedules . . . when I make my turn toward the homestretch of the week and try to meet the deadline of demands, just like you. Alas, we are simply geared too high. Thanks to Alka-Seltzer, Excedrin, Sleep-eze, and Compoz, we repeat our nonproductive haste with monotonous regularity. As Peter Marshall put it:
We are in such a hurry, we hate to miss one panel of a revolving door.
Talk about pollution! I want you to think about what our nervous systems undergo just to stay afloat: Noise (music, news, talk, laughter, machinery, appliances, phones, and traffic) from 6:00 a.m. 'til midnight. Speed (bumper-to-bumper at 65 mph, on-ramps and off-ramps, deadlines and appointments) that makes us frown rather than smile . . . that causes us to check our watches more often than checking in with our Lord. Activities (meetings, services, suppers, luncheons, breakfasts, rallies, and clubs--all "necessary" and "nice") that have a way of dismissing quietness like an unwanted guest. Sure--some things are important--super, in fact--but not everything. Listen, if you and I really treasure quietness, we will have to make time for it. When you feed it only the "leftovers" from the schedule, it always goes hungry.
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