So That Something In Me Would Not Stay Quiet

Mairead noticed it on the coastal path, of all places, about four miles out, with her friend Blathnaid walking half a step behind because the path is narrow there.

They had been talking about nothing. The wind. Somebody's kitchen extension.

And Blathnaid said, in a gap, "You never told me about the appeal."

Mairead said the appeal went through. It went through in March.

It was now August.

Blathnaid stopped walking, which on that path means the person behind you walks into you, and said, not accusingly, genuinely bewildered, "Mairead. That was the whole thing. That was five years."

And Mairead stood on a path above the sea and could not explain it and has been trying to explain it ever since.

Here is her best attempt. She said that in the five years, the quiet had been useful. If you say a thing out loud and then it does not happen, you have to un-say it to everyone. If you never say it, you never have to. So she stopped saying things. She stopped saying hopeful things first, and then she stopped saying most things, and by the end she was giving updates in a voice she describes as reading out a weather forecast for another country.

And when the letter finally came, in March, the equipment for saying anything about it was simply not there any more. She had not maintained it. She read the letter twice and put it in the drawer with the others and went to work.

She said: "I didn't celebrate. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't even tell Him."

Blathnaid, who is not a preacher and would be alarmed to be called one, said, "What do you mean you didn't tell Him?"

And Mairead said, "I mean it never occurred to me that anybody would want to know."

They walked another two miles. And somewhere near the point where the path drops down to the strand, Mairead said out loud, into the wind, to nobody visible, "The appeal went through."

She said it was the first sentence she had said in five years that she did not have to manage.

You may have gone quiet too. It is not a spiritual failing and it is not coldness. It is what a long hard stretch teaches, and it is a very sensible piece of self-protection, and it works. And nobody has ever told you that when the hard stretch ends, the quiet does not automatically end with it, and that you may need to be shown the way back to your own voice.

The Psalm Says Why The Turn Happens

There is a line in a psalm about a turn from grief to gladness, and unusually for Scripture it states its own purpose in the sentence right after it.

"Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing... To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent."Psalm 30:11-12

To the end that. In other words, for this reason, for this outcome. The turn had a purpose and the purpose is stated.

And the purpose is not that the person feels better, which you might expect. The purpose is that something in them would sing and not be silent.

You have something in you that was never designed to stay quiet, and Scripture names it as the reason the turn happened at all. Psalm 30 puts the singing in the purpose clause rather than as an optional response, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and puts it down on a coastal path four miles from anywhere.

Notice the last three words. And not be silent. The psalm knows about silence. It is not naive about it. It names silence as the thing the turn was meant to end, which means it takes for granted that a person can be turned and still be quiet, which is exactly what happened to a woman with a letter in a drawer since March.

You were brought through something so that a voice in you would come back, and the coming back is the point rather than a bonus. That is what the written word says the turn is for, and it is the Spirit of God who does the work of getting a sentence out of somebody who has been managing every one of them for five years.

Nobody Is Telling You Off For The Quiet

Now the careful part, because a person in Mairead's position does not need one more thing to have done wrong.

The quiet was not a sin. It was a shelter. It did a real job for five years and it kept her from a particular kind of pain that people who have not been through a long uncertain thing do not understand.

Nothing in Psalm 30 rebukes anybody for going quiet. It simply says what the turn was for, and lets that stand.

So this is not a page telling you to be more expressive. It is a page telling you that if the hard stretch has ended and you find you cannot say anything about it, you are not broken, and the equipment can come back, and it usually comes back one sentence at a time and usually out loud.

You have not lost the ability to speak to God, and the silence was never held against you. It is written that He is near to the broken hearted and saves the crushed in spirit, which is a description of Somebody who was present through all five years of the quiet, and His Spirit is the one who has been keeping the voice warm while it was not in use.

And here is the guard. Nothing on this page is a requirement. There is no volume, no wording, no timescale, no proportion of anything, and nothing routed to any person or work at all. If you read this and say nothing out loud for another six months, you are exactly as much His the whole way through, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming a demand made of somebody who has already carried enough.