I’m writing here because if I can’t write here where else can I write? Here more than anywhere else I can have the freedom and courage to speak. You are my Father. I don’t have to be afraid of you not understanding.
There are so many words in the world, so many ways to begin things. All I want is to speak, but it seems like the scariest thing to do, probably because it is the one thing I know you made me for beyond loving. That would make the fear of failure even more acute. I think and I see and I breathe and I touch. Give me voice and freedom to speak. This is my offering and no, it will never be perfect enough for anyone’s ears, but still I speak to you who gave lips and eyes and ears and fingers and heart.
My heart is for you. But how do I speak that? I get caught up in things too big to handle because I cannot narrow my focus with you in my sights, with you on my mind and my heart. There is, plain and simply, too much to say. “Of the making of many books there is no end.” Why should I add my voice to the throng? Endless words. But I want them to say something.
What do I want? My pursuit of this speaking seems to match up with my pursuit of holiness. The thing I most desire is the thing I’m most afraid to pursue. But in the process of working with my fear of failing at both, presumably to fix myself before I can begin my journey, I find I have been pursuing both and that they are finding substance within my fear. Like now. I write about my fear of writing and I am writing. I pray about my fear that I will never see holiness and I feel holiness imparted to me in my weary brokenness. Perhaps we can only receive when we are most afraid of not receiving and ask anyway, knowing there is no other option. Perhaps this is grace.
This partly explains why I often can’t write and why I stall in my sanctification. In both, I only measure my progress by quantity and flow, by degrees of goodness and amount of pages. But I’m beginning to see that both are gifts given when I stop trying to achieve them, to listen and listen and listen harder. The more I try, the more white noise invades, and I am overwhelmed. Your voice is not in the noise, but in the stillness, the absolute silence. You are not another sound I have to pick out from the chaos. You are the only place where silence resides. Peace. We strive in noise, in sound. We sit and receive in silence.
This is my writing, then. I am tired because I consider all the voices, all the styles, all the words that I could speak. The noise. But the one word I want can only be found in silence, receiving what I hear and see and touch in that quiet that is me and you and nothing else.
Stillness is the shaping place because it is not the world outside. Holiness on the outside, the things I can see in myself, come from within the sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, the stillness in chaos, the silence in noise. Holiness is stillness, and in you it can come to the world. Received. In speaking, as in holiness, I am not giving but receiving. This is grace.
