Quiet

Life is very rarely quiet now, our days littered with noise and while some of it is unavoidable I'd say most of it is noise I choose. When life is genuinely busy, those little moments feel almost harmless, just small attempts to stay caught up in the cracks between responsibilities. But it isn’t when I’m busy that I reach for noise, it's when things are quiet.

That is when I fill the silence most intensely. Some part of me is trying to convince myself that I am still working hard, still creating progress, still becoming something. There is a real defiance of our humanity in this kind of busyness. We were not made to be this way, and yet I keep returning to it. “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” 

Lately, I’ve started riding my bike back and forth to the shop. It’s a short ride through fields and old roads, and most days I ride with headphones on; A sermon, podcast, business interview. Something useful enough to justify the noise. Today I watched a video I had taken while riding, and you know what I noticed? It was quiet. Not silent. Quiet. Slow rhythmic breathing, the sound of tires on pavement, wind moving through crops in the field, and leaves stirring in the trees along the edge. It was not empty, in fact it was full. When I rode home for dinner, I left my headphones on my desk and just listened.

I don’t know why we fight quiet so hard. Maybe it’s fear of missing out, fear of falling behind, fear of being irrelevant, fear that if we stop performing for a moment, the world will move on without us. Jamie Winship, a writer and speaker I admire, recently said: “Our human fear has the potential of actually pushing us away from the very thing that our identity came to be a part of resolving.” That sentence has stayed with me, because I think my fear of quiet has done exactly that.

I have spent the last year trying to build a brand, tell the story, document the move, write the blog, film for YouTube, post the reels, share the stories, feed the platforms, and keep the whole thing moving. And very little of it has felt life-giving. I don’t say that with bitterness. There is value in telling the story, and sharing the work. There is value in inviting people into the process. But the pressure to create the volume of content supposedly necessary to build a meaningful brand has left me feeling hollow. Especially when nearly all of my work still comes through the same sources it did originally: relationships, reputation, people who know me, people who have used the tools, people who have heard from someone else that the work is good. Meanwhile, the constant effort to manufacture attention has made it harder to be attentive to the actual life in front of me.

My shop, my town, my heart and my family. The people God keeps placing in my path. So I’m not going to keep going that route. Not because I’m quitting, but maybe I’m finally listening. I feel that God has placed me here, asked me to be still, and then watched as I’ve spent the last year trying to fill the quiet. Trying to prove that I’m doing enough, that I am enough.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

I no longer wish to sit in the ignorance of my pies, but build on a foundation of faithful confidence. 

Hopefully today you'll notice how full the quiet is; soak it up and bring your whole self to the table.