I used to be afraid of silence.
Not the dramatic, cinematic kind of silence. The ordinary kind. The kind that settles over a room when the television is off and the phone is face down and there is nothing left to do but sit with yourself.
I would fill it. With music, with podcasts, with the low hum of background noise that gave the impression of company without requiring anything of me.
I didn't realise, for a long time, that I was running.
The silence, when I finally stopped avoiding it, was not empty. It was full. Full of things I had been too busy to notice. Grief I hadn't finished grieving. Questions I hadn't allowed myself to ask. A tiredness that went deeper than sleep could reach.
And beneath all of that, something else. Something quieter and more persistent.
A presence.
I am not sure I have the language to describe it adequately. It was not dramatic. There was no audible voice, no vision, no moment of sudden clarity. It was more like the gradual awareness of something that had always been there, waiting patiently for me to become still enough to notice.
The Psalms speak of this often. Be still and know. Wait on the Lord. In quietness and trust is your strength.
I used to read those verses as instructions. Now I read them as invitations.
There is something that happens in silence that cannot happen anywhere else. A kind of settling. A reorientation. The noise of the world loses its grip, and something truer begins to surface.
I don't think silence is the absence of God. I think it is often where He is most clearly found.