SANCTUARIES OF SILENCE

365 Days of Thanksliving — Day 113

This evening, the wife I decided to take a road trip to New Ulm to grab a bite and go to “Mainards” to buy some air filters (of all things). So exciting, right?

But I gotta tell ya; it was nerving for a while. The reason: the radio wasn’t playing and the car was in EV mode quite a bit. The Kia doesn’t "purr"—it just emits a low, smug electric hum that seems designed to highlight exactly how loud your own thoughts are. For a short while, it was just TOO QUIET!

There is a specific kind of mental gymnastics required to survive a silent car when your brain refuses to find the "off" switch. I’ve never been officially diagnosed, but I’m fairly certain my internal monologue is actually a 24-hour news cycle with forty-seven open tabs, three of which are frozen and playing 80s synth-pop at max volume.

Some people call this constant mental chatter a "gift." I call it a full-time job I never applied for.

Those "blessed" souls who can just sit in a room and be are a complete mystery to me. I usually need an audio-visual buffer—a podcast, a playlist, the TV—just to keep the peace.

On this drive, the silence wasn't a refuge; it was an intruder. I eventually had to break and ask my wife to find a "talking head" podcast just to drown out the aggressive commentary of my own brain.

Yet, looking back, I find myself drawn to 1 Thessalonians 4:11: "aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands." 

I’m incredibly thankful for people like my wife who actually know how to do this. She inhabits the stillness without needing a background track, while for me, "living quietly" is a sanctuary I'm still trying to find the key to.

But I do catch glimpses of it. I find my sanctuaries in the organic moments where the noise finally retreats. Standing in a frozen field at 2 AM, waiting for a long exposure of the Milky Way, the silence stops being an enemy and starts being a chapel. In the stillness of the night, or sitting alone in the quiet of the sanctuary at church, the world gets small enough that my thoughts can finally align with God’s.

Now that it’s warming up and Milky Way season is back, I’m looking forward to heading back out to my "field chapel." I’m thankful for those brief windows where I can actually manage to quiet the noise, and I’m thankful for a God who meets me in the stillness—even when I have to fight my own brain just to get there.