Episode 53 - When You Have Nothing to Say

With my illness there are some days where I just don’t seem to be able to think at all. My brain just feels foggy and I find it hard to process my thoughts or make sense of the world around me. It feels a bit like the world is a man speaking into a microphone which is turned up so loud that you can’t hear what he’s saying. It’s like the world is too much for me to take in. This isn’t a problem at all. I can just find somewhere quieter (and maybe a little darker) to hide out for a while. My family are great and very understanding of this. They don’t mind me disappearing on them and still find ways for me to spend time with them; from sitting watching TV with the sound turned down annoyingly low to me just sat in the same room as them as they get on with their work.

There’s one relationship however, that I thought might suffer because of this; my relationship with God. Of course I always knew that God understands what I’m going through more than anyone else, but still to my mind, there was a problem. You see my relationship with God is largely centred around me doing stuff; me reading my bible, me talking to God, me singing worship songs… you get the picture. So when I don’t feel that I can do anything, that relationship must suffer. Or at least so I thought. I didn’t want that to happen, but I knew that there was nothing I could do about it.

Something I drew during one of my "quiet times"

Now I had long ago thrown away the idea that me spending time with God regularly had to fit into a traditional routine of “quiet times” that consisted of me reading my bible, saying prayers, and maybe at a push singing or listening to a couple of worship songs. These are excellent things to do regularly, but are far from a complete list of ways to spend time with. I enjoy doing a whole host of things with God; from different ways of learning like watching YouTube videos and even studying maps and genealogies, to things that enabled me to express myself in ways that I find hard to with words like playing the drums and drawing pictures. But when I find myself feeling like I do on these days, all of that seems out of reach.

My favourite thing to do with God is just to sit and listen to Him. I don’t always go away feeling like I have had some great revelation, but I always go away feeling closer to Him and like I can see the world a little clearer. Yet even that seems out of reach on days like these. On days like these I struggle to understand what my Mums saying to me when she talks in plain English so how could I hope to hear God through all the fog. He was out of my reach, and yet I found that I wasn’t out of His. I sat on my bed. No talking. No reading. No listening. And yet I felt His peace fall on me and I knew that He was near. There are many things in this life that can leave us at a loss for words. So when you have no words, just be. And know that you are never out of God’s reach.