My Silent Song: Intro

 “I don’t think the way you think.

The way you work isn’t the way I work.

God’s Decree.

For as the sky soars high above earth,

so the way I work surpasses the way you work,

and the way I think is beyond the way you think.

Just as rain and snow descend from the skies

and don’t go back until they’ve watered the earth,

Doing their work of making things grow and blossom, producing seed for farmers and food for the hungry,

So will the words that come out of my mouth

not come back empty-handed.

They’ll do the work I sent them to do;

they’ll complete the assignment I gave them.

So you’ll go out in joy,

you’ll be led into a whole and complete life.”

(IsaIah 55:8-12 The Message)

Trust doesn’t come quickly for me. I have wrestled with this verse for my entire life. I want to know confidently in my heart, as the scripture says, that God’s way of working and thinking is perfect and that His ways are far beyond my own.

I’ve pictured myself as a soldier standing on a fortified wall, staring out at sea with resolution and calm on my face, knowing that I love my cause. I am ready to fight and stand my ground. But I find myself, as I look out at the boundless sea with endless enemies lost in the fog, with fear in my heart.

“Oh Lord, you have given me my marching orders. How do I keep from wavering?”

Losing my voice for eight months left me with many questions about myself and about God’s decrees, but what I gained in that season of silence, as I like to call it, is the ability to trust my Lord. I got to know God in a new way and fell more in love with Him, and His ways, and His thoughts. Getting to know someone is the natural path to the kind of trust that lets you run at full speed and jump into their arms with your eyes closed. God’s kindness and familiarity inspire a trust that may feel fear but then tells fear where to go. This trust leads you into perfect peace. This book is my journey to that place of peace with God.

This book is also my psalm, my messy, desperate song of praise to a God who promises that His words do not come back empty-handed, my cry for God’s help and His guiding hand, my pages of declaring my weaknesses, my moments of despair and helplessness put to paper, in an attempt to find meaning in the random. And this psalm of mine is also a whole-hearted acknowledgment of God’s moment by moment capacity to see me, to hear me, and to love me well. My chapters are my growing pains as I learned how to walk, again, into a whole and complete life.

My hope is that the words that I have poured onto these pages will not come back empty-handed. My prayer is that as you read and as you wrestle with your own seasons of desperation that you will lean on the indispensable help of the Holy Spirit as He leads you into a whole and complete life.