"Spiteful words can hurt your feelings, but silence breaks your heart."

I don't know how much I agree with that. Even if C.S. Lewis did say it. (Sacrilege!) Sometimes silence is a gift. Sometimes not hearing is just as good as hearing.

Except when it's not. Sometimes silence is the cruelest form of rejection.

So I'm not sure where I land with this one. Maybe that's why I have a hard time when friends fall silent, when songs stop playing, when the God-ache in me seems to echo.

Does silence mean the worker is focused on his work, or that he's abandoned it all together?

"God's first language is Silence. 

Everything else is a translation."

It's when I hope for communication, anticipate conversation, that silence meets me cold and heartless. Then when I crave silence the most, a dear friend will sit at my side without a word, and I find it to be the most comforting.

When I was in Africa this past summer, I decided to take a clip of the jungle behind our villa. I knew I would forget what it was like.

I would forget what it was like to be ok with silence.

That wild silence that soothes. So I captured a minute of it.

Right here.



And for this reason, I'm gathering up all the voids. All those vacant spaces of thought, of feeling, of noise, I'm pulling together and tossing into this jungle symphony.