When words run out
Before I went to Big Church Festival, I had been thinking quite a lot about silence. I had written about the need to find space in our busy lives to stop, to breathe, to listen, and simply to be in God’s presence. Tracey and Gilbert have since spoken about some of these things, so I don't want to repeat what they have said. But the idea of silence has continued to sit with me, and I think perhaps I have begun to understand it a little differently. When something happens to us, our natural instinct is to tell someone. When something wonderful happens, we want to share it. We want someone else to know, to celebrate with us, to say, “That's amazing.” And when something difficult happens, we want to talk about that too. We look for someone who will listen, reassure us, help us make sense of what has happened, or simply sit alongside us while we try to work it out. And that is good. We need one another. But eventually, the talking stops. The phone goes down. The messages stop coming...