Quiet

I am a verbal processor. You have probably noticed this by now. I have to talk things out. Everything. Seriously. I just can't process things when they're all jumbled up inside my head. I need to talk it out to find the common thread of what God is trying to teach me. But the process isn't done then. Then I have to go write about it. It's only after I've written about something that I truly understand it. 


Well, sort of.


I've been struggling since I got back from Colombia. I guess I shouldn't say I've been struggling, because it isn't like I've ever struggled before. I'm not discouraged or lost or running or looking for God. He's here. He's been right here all along like he always is. He has shown up in spades in the moments I have needed him to. But the rest of the time, he isn't nearly as verbal as he usually is in my life. He's just very quiet lately.


I'm being stretched. God is not only annihilating the box I didn't know I had put him in, he is blowing the boundaries off everything in my life. The things that not only he can do, but the things he can and probably will call me to do. I love it.


But that's just the part of it that I understand. There is something incredibly deep, something subtle but fundamental that he is shifting. He is changing something very deep and very important in me. And I have no idea what that is.


I understand the world best when it is put into words. And since God is being very quiet these days, it confuses me. Usually, when God is teaching me something, it is through use of words. Whether it be conversations with other people, or him giving me words directly, words tend to be how he teaches me important things. But not this time around. I can tell he is doing something important, but I don't know what it is. And I don't think I'm going to. There are no words, and I don't think there will be. There is simply a stirring in my soul, a shifting of my heart, and silence.


I realized today that he is being quiet because quiet is what I need. But even more than that, he is being quiet so that I can't even try to understand what he's doing in me. Maybe it's too deep, too subtle for me to ever understand, or maybe I'm just not supposed to right now. I don't know.


But whatever the reason, I can't even try to understand or put into words what God is teaching me right now. And in that I am reminded that God doesn't need me. He changes me for good, for his glory, and my heart is his. He changes it, and sometimes I don't get to see it or understand it or really be a part of it at all. Sometimes he just changes it and I'll never even know what he did. I just know that the heart in me is different and a little bit more Christlike than it was before.