When was the last time you took a walk through winter woods?

There’s a quiet ache in the January forest.  All year, the woods have been vibrantly alive—a rich symphony of sound and color and movement.  In spring, they don the filmy chartreuse of new leaves and welcome migratory birds back from tropical regions.  As the days stretch into summer, they provide a shady shelter where hundreds of insects click in the lazy afternoons and newborn fawns romp, flashing their dazzling white spots.  Even in autumn, the season of descent, the woods are still alive—lavish displays of color, arching antlers of nimble bucks, pale grace of birches and the last faded leaves floating gently downstream as the wild geese cry overhead.

But in winter, all the life seems to have leaked away.  The chorus of frogs and insects and birds has fallen silent; the only sound is the roaming wind in the barren treetops, with perhaps an occasional twitter from the hardy birds of winter—such as the little juncos, “snow birds” we call them, or the mournful moan of an owl.  And as sound is muted, color is too.  The world is washed in neutral hues…beige of withered grass, stark silver of leafless trunks, rusty brown of fallen leaves.  Even the sunlight seems weakened and watery, as if the year of life and birth and beauty has left all creation too tired to do anything but sleep and dream of what once was.  

I feel it, this sacred silence, when I walk through the winter woods.  My fondest memories from hikes taken during this season involve moments of transcendent stillness.  Watching the golden perfection of the full moon rise above tangled birch branches.  Enjoying a “conversation” with a talkative barred owl during velvet dusk.  (Over the years, I’ve learned the calls of several owl species in my region; not infrequently, I can persuade them to answer me.)  Running homeward through the fallen leaves, with a slow-burning sunset simmering on the horizon and the first shy stars peeking above me and my breath swirling wild in the ice-born air.  These are all moments of indefinable stillness, moments when the heartbeat of the world thrummed slow and all that had rejoiced and danced and laughed and labored under the summer skies drowsed in the piles of dead leaves.

Yes, the winter woods sing a slower cadence, and because of this, there’s a sadness in the air—a faint taste of melancholy, elusive and uncertain.  After all, it’s hard to see the crispy leaves, the bereaved trees, and the barren hillsides without feeling a twinge of regret for summer’s lost vibrancy.  Yet I love the winter woods, even when they seem most inhospitable.  When I shuffle through last autumn’s leaves, when I glimpse the deer in their muted winter coats, when I marvel at ice-encrusted streams and twittering chickadees, I am enjoying a commodity that is both rare and mundane, prized and abhorred—quiet. 

Our society has a bizarrely paradoxical relationship with quiet.  Oh, we pretend to value it highly.  When we’re overwhelmed, we couple its name with “peace,” bemoaning our need for that life-giving combination.  We’re always speaking of its merits, always remembering its benefits for our health, our concentration, our sanity.  Some of us even go so far as to attend seminars or whole conferences on how to apply its principles to our spiritual walk.  Quiet is important.  We know it is.

Yet on the other hand, despite our professions, we don’t actually want quiet.  It might be respected, but it is not loved.  If you don’t believe me, just look at how little space we leave it in our daily lives.  We are constantly surrounding ourselves with more stimuli—television shows, radios, Bluetooth devices, even “white noise” machines whose sole purpose is to shatter the stillness.  Perhaps this is because, under all our professions of regard, quiet is frankly one of the most frightening states for a human being.  Devotional writer Amber C. Haines addresses this concern:  “I’ve been dabbling with the quiet because I need to hear from God, but the truth about the quiet is that it has opened me up wide, turned on my dulled senses, and faced me toward my rawest, loneliest places….[T]he quieter it gets, the lonelier I feel and the more I am left to deal with my own thoughts and what I really believe about God.”  

Most of us can relate to this confession.  Quiet has a strange way of dismantling our defenses and denuding our hidden hearts.  We may preach its advantages, but we would prefer to theorize, not experience.  However, I believe it is time for us, as the people of God, to make peace with the presence of silence.  For it is often in the holiness of hush that the voice of God is most audible.

Consider the episode recorded in 1 Kings 19—a glimpse into the life of God’s servant Elijah.  When we see the mighty prophet in this passage, a tremendous bout of spiritual warfare has left him victorious but also exhausted—in body, mind, and spirit.  He has retreated to the wilderness (a move with which I can’t help but sympathize!) and fallen into a despair so dark that he has begged God to take his life!  In this time of trouble, God visits this broken man—but not in the way we might expect. 

As Elijah huddles in a small cave on a mountainside, a pageant of dramatic phenomena passes before him—a violent wind strong enough to tear chunks of rock off the mountain, an earthquake that shakes the foundations of the land, and even a raging wildfire with flames whipping past that cave of refuge.  At the end of these events, though, Elijah hears “a still small voice.”  Recognizing the One Who speaks to him, he reverently wraps his face in his cloak and goes forth to commune with the Lord.

I read this passage, and I can’t help but shake my head.  A still small voice?  This method of communication seems odd to me, so imagine how much stranger it must have been for Elijah!  It’s interesting to note that the wind, the fire, and the earthquake were all ways in which God had manifested Himself previously in Scripture.  Indeed, He had a history of appearing to Israel in dramatic ways—the parting of the Red Sea and the subsequent destruction of the world’s largest army, the pillar of blazing fire that led the Hebrews through the desert, even the merciless plagues that consumed the doubters and naysayers.  Elijah himself had just come from Mount Carmel, where his prayers were answered with the jaw-dropping response of fire shooting from the sky to validate his ministry and his faith.  Surely, then, as he waited in that cave, he watched each new display, familiar from history, with expectation.  This is it!  Here He comes!  Yet the God of the whole universe, the One Whose breath parts the oceans and Whose word cracks the sky with thunder, chose to speak in a still small voice.  Ordinary.  Boring.  Even anticlimactic.

Yet unmistakably divine.

And if you think that this was a special exception, that God no longer speaks in the quiet, then think again.  It’s a truth I’m reminded of each time I stand in the winter forest and hear nothing louder than the scuffing of birds in the fallen leaves or the gentle wind sighing through the treetops—quiet is one of God’s favorite ways of communicating with His people.

Why?  Why would He choose this humble way of speaking to us? 

For starters, quiet is often not as drab as it appears.  In fact, it’s sometimes the only way God can get our attention.  Just consider how many noises vie for our scattered focus—humming ceiling fans, barking dogs, creaking doors, yelling people, honking horns, roaring jets, bleeping alarms.  My cell phone alone, so my analytics reveal, assaults me with a ridiculous average of sixty-one notifications every day—and that’s after I systematically disabled this function for most apps and programs.  Moreover, in the spiritual realm, we face another layer of “noise pollution” as we are constantly assailed with Satan’s bombardment of fear and doubt, worry and regret, guilt and uncertainty and ever-fluctuating emotional states.  Just as a teacher might stop talking in order to get the attention of an unruly class—just as a silent pause in a darkened theater cues the focus of the crowd for what is to come—God sometimes uses quiet as a means of redirecting our focus to Him and making us hungry for His Presence.  Indeed, this seemingly mundane medium is sometimes the most dramatic tool God can use!  

Once God has our attention, quiet can also become His avenue of compassion.  When we are hurting, when our world has been clawed to shreds and it seems no power on earth or heaven can put it together again, the last thing we need is for God to show off.  We only need Him to show up—to sit with us in our pain, to hold us with gentle hands, to carefully pull together our sharp and shattered pieces, our raw and bleeding edges, and hug us close to His heart.  Think about Elijah’s situation again.  Confused, alone, dejected, and burned out, he had no use for a raging wildfire or an uncontrollable windstorm.  He only needed the still small voice—the invitation to intimacy.  And often, that’s what we also desire–the beckoning welcome that urges us to crawl out of whatever cave we’ve hidden in.  

And when we come forth from that cave in answer to that still small voice, then the true beauty of quiet begins to blossom.  You see, it’s an undervalued principle that quiet equals growth.  In our culture, quiet is viewed passively—as merely a gap to be filled.  Indeed, we perceive quiet as an indicator that nothing is happening.  However, this is far from the truth.  The great periods of growth in our lives happen not during the bright and sunshiny times, but during the long agonizing stretches of silence. 

This is nowhere more true than in the winter forest.  The trees look dead, the colors have leaked from the landscape, the air is bitter, the birds have flown, and the grass is merely crumbling stalks.  To our eyes, the quiet of this season symbolizes death and decay, not vigor and vitality.  

But right now, in that “dead” winter forest, blanketed by all that silence, growth is happening.  It’s creeping up on the world in ways we don’t even notice.  The sap is circulating in the trees; many of them have already set leaf buds, the embryos of the spring foliage that perch on the deadened branches like patient reminders that spring is on the way.  The birds that disappeared in the fall are preparing for their northward journey; in fact, some may have already begun their flight as we speak.  Those fawns whose antics I enjoy each spring are, like most of the season’s offspring, still developing inside their pregnant mothers through these winter days.  And all this growth—the child of the silence—is what makes the miracle of spring possible at all.

Maybe this is what we’re supposed to remember when we see the winter woods.  Too often, we view silence as a frightening void or even a disgrace—a sign of being abandoned or defeated.  Silence means that we are not doing enough, or that our lives are dwindling to stagnation, or even that God is ignoring us and has turned His attention to more deserving children.  Yet in the Creator’s world, quiet is the opposite of the negative meanings we ascribe to it.  Quiet is the lullaby sung lovingly to the growing earth, the blessing poured out on its efforts, the wellspring from which the succession of other seasons flows. 

Yes, the winter woods look barren.  And at times, so do our lives.  We’ve all crouched in a cave and wept with Elijah.  But today, if you find yourself in silence, please know this above all—you are not forsaken.  His eye does not leave you for one moment.  In this season of quiet, embrace His nearness, and enjoy His gentleness, and expect His growth.  Great things are coming, slowly building, taking root in ways too small to notice.  The quiet is not deadening—it is quickening.  So smile in the silence—and when you hear that still small voice, be ready to respond, “Speak, for Your servant is listening” (1 Samuel 3:10 NASB).

What are some ways God has spoken to you in the quiet? Let me know in the comments!

Also, if you enjoyed the quotation by Amber C. Haines, I encourage you to check out her website here. She’s an artist of words who uses her writing to spill the sacred story of how God poured His grace on the broken edges of her life. (Also, her blog is called the RunaMuck. You have to love that name!). I’ve never met her personally, but her writing is an inspiration to me.

Lastly, I have a big goal for this year–and I need your help to make it come true! Watch for an email with more details, coming soon!