400 Years of Silence. Or Something Like That.

It's been ... um ... a little while since I've written.

Like, a year. 

My friend Abby—whose oldest 3 children are a boy and twin girls, 21 months apart—once told me that when the twins were born, she just lost a whole year of her life. Not like her life expectancy was shortened by a year, but like a whole year went by and she didn't know what had happened. 

I relate. 

Being a family of five still feels like a new thing...so crazy!

Elijah (kid #3) turned one this month. I have no idea where that year went.
I lost it between diaper changes and nursing sessions. I lost it running Lorien back and forth from preschool. I lost it holding down the fort while Josh traveled overseas for work. I lost it between the clothes dryer and my bedroom floor, where the clean laundry piles up and rarely gets all put away. 

I wrote nothing. A year of silence. Like the gap between the Old and New Testaments when God was silent.

And yet.

Silent is not the same as stagnant. So much was happening in the silence.

I have longed to put words to it. I will. It'll be slow, but I will do it.

Right now, I'll just say this: I've been silent because I've been in over my head. And it has been so. good. for. me. God has wrestled away some of my old ways of viewing the world and doing life. New growth is shooting up from the soil.

Silent, but not Stagnant

In the 400 years of silence between covenants, God was not still. He was moving very deliberately. Bringing Zechariah's rotation up for service in the temple at just the right time. Giving Simeon a promise. Allowing Joseph and Mary to become betrothed just in time to rock their worlds with the announcement of a seemingly illicit pregnancy.

Moving, putting all the pieces in place, getting ready for big things ahead.  

I hope there are big things ahead. I feel like I'm being prepared for something. Maybe more than one something.

Sometimes life gets so hard to handle that it silences us. Sometimes—and these are scary times—God himself is silent. But silent doesn't mean stagnant. Know that. Find hope in that. New life is stirring beneath the surface of the quiet soil.

What has God grown from seasons of silence in your life?