Day 13: Not in the fire… #adventbookclub

As someone who is very much a contemplative at heart, who feels most closely connected with God in silence and stillness, I love today’s passage (1 Kings 19.9-18). Elijah finds God not in any of the loud, obvious, impressive places he might have expected, but in the absolute silence.

For me, it is perhaps the other way round. I expect to find God in silence. And when I have a week like this one, where silence and stillness are in short supply, I find it harder to find God at all. But lately I’ve been thinking that actually the silence which Elijah heard is always there. Yes, it’s harder to hear amid the noise and chaos, but it’s always there underneath, because God is always there. And we can learn to listen to the silence, to be attentive to God’s presence, in any situation. I am trying to learn to listen through the noise to the silence beyond it.