I am sorry that I have been so reticent to blog. The idea has crossed my mind various times, but usually it is shoved right back out by some or other excuse to do something else. It's difficult living on a beautiful farm. At times, the motivation to stay inside and stare at a computer screen just doesn't exist. I blame my lack of reading on this same excuse. It is simply too beautiful and too interesting to be hanging out inside.
There are other dangers on the farm. I may have mentioned in previous posts or Herron articles (in my Hobe Sound days) that I live in a house made by three separate generations. The kitchen, drawing room (or sitting room) and dining area as well as the hall way and pantry were built over 100 years ago. Another section, running perpendicular to the hall, houses the four bedrooms and two bathrooms and was built in the 50's by Uncle Johan's father. Uncle Johan built another addition (in the 90's when we were living in Lesotho) that is no longer connected with the main house by an inside door, but serves now as an exterior apartment. It is a charming place to live.
The danger. In addition to a lack of concentration due to breath-taking surroundings; there are the occasional puff adder or cobra that find their way inside. The oldest section of the house, namely the dining area and drawing room, is floored with beautiful, Oregon Pine that was laid down some one hundred years ago. As you can imagine, the original protective coating has long since parted ways with the floor and has been painstakingly scuffed off on countless pairs of shoes. This is another cause for danger. One often finds oneself the recipient of a piece of American exportation history in the toe or heel of an unclad foot. This is uncomfortable to say the least.
The other danger on the farm is the silence. Silence is unnerving. I don't know if you have ever experienced a place that has the absence of sound. In America, everything is sound. If a car is not driving by, a plane is flying overhead and if not that then the air-conditioner or heater just came on. We are surrounded by sound, but on the farm, in the dark of night, I am surrounded by silence. A deep, pregnant silence; full of possibilities that come up in ghoulish figures like ghosts from the past taking me on tours of mistakes and failures and missed opportunities. The silence is not really the danger. The possibilities that this silence presents to my mind are not the danger. The desire to destroy the silence, to hide these specters in sound, that is the danger.
In this deep silence I am laid bare. All my false pretense of strength and independence disappear and in the thick darkness I come face to face with who I am inside. When all is well and my soul is at peace, this silence is a comfort, but when I struggle with doubts, insecurities and failures, then monsters lurk in the shadows. The biggest danger I face is to put in headphones, turn on the radio, or a video and drown the silence in constant, seemingly innocuous noise. When I face this silence and the searching it brings and when I face these insecurities, failures and missed opportunities and deal with them, wrapped in this cloak of "holy darkness" before Almighty God, then I emerge a new man. A stronger man that has wrestled an angel and though I may come away with a slight limp, a thorn in my side, the struggle brings forth gold.
Christ faced His moments of darkness and silence. He was in a wilderness for forty days. Prior to commercial jets and large cities, I can imagine that the silence there was beyond anything I have ever experienced. But Christ suffered a far greater silence. He faced a silent God, an unresponsive Father. If you read the Gospels, Christ was constantly in contact with His Father. In John 8, He told the Jews that He does only what the Father tells Him to and says only what the Father tells Him to. This required constant communication with God and there are many places in the Gospels where we see Jesus going to get alone with His Father.
I have been experiencing a silent God. I know it is my fault. I have smothered the silence in noise and given God the "leftover" hours of my day when I am too tired to concentrate on His Word and to listen for His voice. I have sinned the sin of self-idolatry. Giving myself the best hours of the day and relegating God to the late-night infomercial slot. In the loneliness of this silence it has struck me how nothing we experience compares to the extent to which Jesus experienced it. He had constant and perfect communication with God the Father and suddenly it was taken away from Him in the completion of a task that God the Father asked Him to do.
In this I am reminded that when we face things like this, we have an advocate with God the Father. His name is Jesus Christ the Righteous and He stands at the right hand of God the Father ready to intercede for us. Does this mean that I continue on in my sin? No; as the apostle Paul would say, "God forbid!" I make time for Him, welcome the silence and ask Him if there is anything I can do to change.
I started this off as a short filler blog to tell about how I have been pulling splinters out of my foot, but I guess there was more inside. I hope the rambling hasn't been too distracting. I really hadn't planned on writing half of this.
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