For a number of years I have had to prepare a fresh two-minute message for each day on our ‘Dial good news’ telephone ministry. My method is to put a whole month’s messages onto one tape. Yet the biggest problem was always in finding a quiet place to record them and that’s not easy. jets go screaming overhead, the telephone rings, dogs bark, traffic noise goes by and radios play. Everywhere it seems there’s noise, and sometimes I just long for silence.
Now with all this in mind I came across some words of Carlo Corretto’s the other day, in which he was describing part of his training – getting away with a hamper of bread, a few dates, some water and a Bible. A day’s march into the desert, a cave, and there he was alone with God. And then he says, ‘Here, living in perpetual silence, one learns to distinguish its different shades. Silence of the church, silence in one’s cell, silence at work, interior silence, silence of the soul. God’s silence’.
And suddenly I began to realise that there is something in us that needs to be silent.
Is this why some folks can’t stand silence at any cost. ‘I just switch the radio on for company, you know.’
The command of God to ‘be still and know that I am God’ means that there is a silence in which you alone stand before God.

Now read: I Kings 19: 9 – 13.