52 Silent Sundays

Divorce caused a shift in how I view relationships, past, present, & future.

It made me more skeptical of people’s intentions, especially when it came to my life.

Now, don’t worry this post isn’t going to be a sappy dive into how liberating that decision was, because it wasn’t.

It’s also not about how I emerged with a higher sense of self, because that also didn’t happen.

But, it did reveal a frightening truth about my relationship with God, and that was something I didn’t see coming.

It revealed the pause that occurred in my communication with God during my quite time when everything around me was crumbling.

Now, that doesn’t include my prayers for the big things, like healing and freedom from the things that often tripped me up.

(Like my mouth, but we don’t need to go there with this post.)

A lot of what was happening in my mind and heart influenced my relationship with God.

The discomfort of being more reserved resulted in awkward silence, and not the deeply spiritual, wisdom-filled, transformative kind.

Just awkward silence.

No more asking curious questions, no reading and listening for a deeper understanding.

Just awkward silence.

Struggling to find a way through the deafening quiet, a podcast was born.

We talked about nonsense for hundreds of minutes and had some great bloopers of pure communication madness.

It is where I started to rediscover my voice with God.

With each conversation recorded and the ones that happened off the mic, I started to use my voice in the most sacred of spaces.

I begin to have moments when the silence wasn’t so awkward.

Where the communication with God returned.

And during the past year I have been in a space where the clumsy weirdness was all but gone.

Now that doesn’t mean I’m a normal person now, because I think it’s just coded into my dna to be weird.

But when I look back I have a fondness for those 52 silent Sundays.

52 weeks of wrestling my way out of the pity I sat in.

52 weeks of rediscovering me and what I had buried deep.

52 weeks of uncertain praise.

52 weeks of my savior letting me be authentically me even in my pain.

52 weeks of confused obedience.

It took me a long time to be able to put into words the unique and confusing space that I was in spiritually during the time when it felt like time stood still.

However, I’ll never regret the time I spent wrestling the internal chaos in the never ending space of God’s grace.

Out of that season grew unfiltered emboldened praise & a deeper love for my Savior.

I’m thankful for those 52 silent Sundays that allowed me the time I needed to get unstuck.