I used to live in the plains. My house had a second story, with a window in my room that could open to the roof of the first story. I liked to climb out the window and sit on the roof every once in a while to stargaze or stare at the endless blue sky. To just listen to the quiet of the plains. Not the silence, but the quiet.
If I sat outside still enough, I could hear the wind blowing on a cooler day, rustling the dirt and leaves on the bushes. At night, I’d listen to the coyotes howling and other creatures wandering under the moon’s soft smile, having avoided the sun’s burning glare all day.
In those quiet moments, I learned how to hear God.
I believed that God was not a silent god from an early age. My parents had taught me that. I remember sitting in church, attending a baptism, or saying prayers, and feeling something. I was taught that it was the Spirit, and that was God’s way of speaking to us. No, God was not silent; we were the silent ones with how we forgot to pray or how we brushed things off. God wants to hear from us. He often speaks with a quiet voice.
The plains are quiet too, and all remains so—until a storm hits.
Due to the flatness of the land, there isn’t anything to block the path of a thunderstorm. As a bull charges, the thunderstorm hits. I like to imagine it was these hooves of crackling storms that pounded the land into flatness.
“It’s God’s way of showing He has better fireworks,” my brother said one Fourth of July as a storm lingered in the background. The lightning stitched the dark rolling clouds together with blinding thread. The bold, vibrating thunder made the fireworks’ zipping and banging quiet in comparison. God can speak loudly, too, if He wants.
The storms never lasted forever. Loudness could only be maintained for so long before the world settled back into its quiet demeanor. Then, on nights after a rainstorm, there were always frogs, croaking out a thankful tune for the rain that had come their way.
Going to college was loud. Loud laughs, loud lectures, loud thoughts. Stretching my ears to understand difficult concepts of physics or chemistry in class. Harnessing all the brain power I could muster to memorize every Renaissance painter and Gothic cathedral for the midterm. Giggling at three in the morning with my friends over words that start with J, because we were so obviously sleep-deprived. I had an unrelenting knowledge that I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Freedom was loud.
Freedom also gave me a lot of opportunities to seek out God on my own terms, not under my parents’ watch. I had to decide for myself if I wanted to keep going to church or not, if I wanted to keep following all the commandments and standards. Freedom was loud, and God spoke to me regardless of the noise around me. It was then, during my freshman year, that I felt a little whisper through the beautiful chaos that I needed to deviate from original plans and serve a mission.
I went to a rainforest on an island for eighteen months.
Then I came home again to the busy life. I was once again occupied with the loud laughs, loud lectures, and loud thoughts. But there was something different in coming back that wore on me like a sander on my mind. A giant, terrible thought repeated in my head. Like a muffler on a car engine, it reduced my other thoughts to background noise. It spoke of my fears, of my inadequacies. It replayed over and over in my mind, all the past failures on high volume. It was a drum pounding in my head.
Thump-thump-thump. You-have-failed.
I hadn’t been alone in a long time. In more than eighteen months. Now when I was alone, a chilling numbness bubbled below the surface, coming up from deep waters, warning me of something truly ominous. In those moments, I couldn’t hear anything. They were silent.
It reminded me of lonely times—of memories that I associate with the colors blue and gray. When the rhythm that I knew so well had crescendoed and died. I have a memory of lying in the grass in high school. My hair lay sprawled out around me like a halo. I could feel little bugs crawling on the blades of grass as they brushed my skin beneath me. But I didn’t move. I didn’t want to. I wanted to lie there until I disappeared. Let my silence be the end.
I lay on the floor of my college dorm room and wanted the same thing.
I wondered if this silence and these pounding thoughts meant something. Was God angry at me? Did He hate me? Was He disappointed in me? Church was no longer the same as it had been. I sat there, singing melodies that were familiar to me but words I couldn’t recognize anymore. My hands shook during Sunday school and Sacrament meetings as I listened to my heartbeat increase.
Ba bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump-ba-bump. You-should-have-been-better-babumpbabumpbabump.
I could never find the quiet sounds. The noise always teetered between the two extremes of nothing and everything. Out of fear, I avoided being alone. Anything to escape the agonizing silence. Anything to drown out the thoughts that were too loud. But sometimes it couldn’t be helped. There were tests to study for, concepts to learn, and programs to apply for. So I kept myself busy and filled my ears with music—anything I had—infusing every second with noise.
I believed that God was not a silent god. I had been taught that. But all I could remember was a night in the middle of a rainforest, with coquí frogs chirping their name-calling chant. Coquí! Coquí! Coquí! Normally, their chirps made me smile, but that night, my thoughts were like glass vases shattering onto the floor. Humidity stuck to my skin like glue, and my curls frizzed around my face. I said my prayers and went to bed but couldn’t fall asleep. The dread settled down in the pit of my stomach; I knew that I was going to have to get up in the morning. But I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to have those thoughts again. Their volume had been increasing over the past months. So I got out of bed, leaving behind our air-conditioned room for the heavy, humid dining room. It was empty save a table and four chairs. The floor tile was warm in the night air.
I knelt in the middle of the empty tile floor and just cried. I prayed, seeking some kind of comfort from a God who I knew wasn’t silent. He was louder than these thoughts in my head. His voice was as booming as thunder and His countenance as bright as the sun. I knew I could receive some measure of peace.
So, I waited.
And then I waited a little bit longer, salty tears streaming down my cheeks.
I don’t even remember hearing the coquís chirping their own names then. At that moment, I couldn’t hear anything at all.
All was silent. Completely silent.
I knew that God was quiet sometimes, but silent? Maybe God is silent sometimes. Maybe not every prayer gets answered.
Maybe you just deserved it.
That’s what my thoughts were telling me with their jagged beat. I think I, in part, told myself these things because I was avoiding getting angry at God. If I couldn’t be mad at Him, someone needed to take the blame. I wish I had realized earlier that there was nothing to feel shame about. I wish I had realized sooner that blame was not a song that I needed to play.
There was something so inherently wrong with these thoughts that I knew something needed to change, even if I did believe them. I found myself searching for a familiar rhythm that I had lost all those months ago, drowned out by the loudness of silence. It was out there. I knew it had to be. I remembered times when it had been quiet.
I often visited the art museum on campus, and toward the end of the semester, I found myself staring at old prints in the bottom gallery. They had Christian themes, all stories from the Bible. I wandered, studying the way lines formed and how shapes were composed in various pieces—until I stood in front of a print of a father hugging his son. I didn’t need to read the title to know the story: A wasteful son, but one who came home. One who was received. One who was celebrated.
In Luke 15:24, the father describes his son as “lost, and [then] found.” Never as wasteful. Never prodigal. Of the two men, I think it was only the son who ever thought about himself in that way. And me. I was the only one who ever thought about myself in that way too.
I stood in the gallery alone. There were no whispers or distractions. But there were also no drowning thoughts or shaking hands.
For the first time in a while, it wasn’t silent. But it wasn’t loud either.
It was beautiful. It was alive. It was familiar.
It was quiet.
I started to remember what quiet was. I sometimes pulled away and drifted off into silence or jarring sounds, but I also slowly remembered the rhythm. There was never just one moment when I remembered. There were many.
A melody of familiar sounds. The scratch-scratch-scratch of charcoal on paper. Of my best friend’s laughter. The crunch-crunch of leaves. Of petals softly falling in the breeze. Of a slightly out-of-tune piano playing. Of my siblings teasing each other. The siz-siz-siz-pop! of cooking food. Of car speakers blasting music, and all of my friends and I belting along. The inhale, exhale of my breath huffing while I ran. Of deep discussions in classrooms. Of crinkly pages being turned. A melody of life began to play in my ears.
I reached out to friends close to me. I talked with my family. I prayed my heart out to my Father in Heaven. It took some time, but the words eventually settled into my soul.
You are loved.
As I sought out more, the less muffled it became. I realized what life really was: a beautiful composition of loud, quiet, and silence.
I made a phone call months later and listened to a voice I was well acquainted with, spoken in a language that had taken me months to understand. I heard the coquís in the background, chanting their names over and over. Coquí! Coquí! Coquí! It reminded me how much I used to love hearing those little coquí frogs. I talked with my friend from the island, and he updated me on all the news I had missed since being gone. No heartbeat too strong or thoughts too loud—just my friend’s voice and the coquí frogs. Coquí! Coquí! Coquí!
You haven’t failed!
I’m pretty sure that I got off the phone and cried. I had a realization of what those thoughts had really been all those months. Wrong. They had been wrong.
Sometimes the silence is real. Sometimes the numbness is so strong that we can’t hear anything at all, or our thoughts are too loud and drown out the beautiful things right in front of us. Our feelings of shame and guilt get in the way of hearing the quiet voice of God. I recognize now that it was not a punishment, nor did I deserve it.
I was trying my best.
And God was listening to me.
I still don’t know why there has been suffocating silence in my life. I might never know why. But I find that God is much more than simply a god who is not silent. He is a god of thunderstorms and of lightning. And He is also a god of frogs croaking their soft little songs after the rainstorms.
I went home for the summer after the semester ended. Back to the plains. As soon as I stepped out of the airplane, I felt the humidity cling to my skin, and I knew I was home. The clouds were rolling along the sky, drenching all in their path—God’s fireworks cracking and booming. It looked like they were on their way to me.
It poured buckets, and for the next couple of nights, if I stood out on the porch, and if I stood there long enough to listen—I could hear the frogs. Just barely, but clearly, croaking out a thankful tune for the rain that had come their way.
