Terrified of Silence

I turned my phone over so many times that night I lost count, checking for a message that wasn't coming, from a company that had already made its decision three business days ago and simply hadn't bothered to tell me. The apartment was quiet in the way it gets after the second unemployment week, when you've stopped even turning on the television for noise because the noise started to feel worse than the silence. I remember standing at the kitchen counter at nearly midnight, not praying exactly, just standing there, waiting for something, anything, to press back against the quiet.

I've read the story of Elijah at Horeb more times than I can count, the wind and the earthquake and the fire passing by him one after another while he waits in the cave, and God is in none of them, and then comes the sound of a low whisper, and that is where God finally is. I used to think that story was mostly about God's gentleness, and it is, but this year I've started to notice something else in it, which is how long Elijah had to sit in the absence before the whisper came at all. He had just watched fire fall from heaven on Carmel. He knew what a loud, unmistakable God could do. And still there was a cave, and still there was waiting, and the waiting was not punishment, it was the road to the voice.

I wish I could tell you the silence stopped feeling like abandonment once I understood that. It didn't, not entirely. Some nights I still stand at that counter and the quiet feels less like a whisper waiting to happen and more like nobody is there at all. I don't have a tidy way past that. I only have the cave, and the story of a man who stayed in it.

I turned the phone face down for good and went to bed. I didn't feel better. I just felt willing to wait one more day.