The Quiet After the Noise

The phone stopped in March and Isla was not ready for what that would be like.

For about four months before that it had been relentless. Messages from people she had not heard from in nine years. Two journalists. A great many people being extremely kind in a way that made it worse, and a smaller number being unkind, and one long afternoon where she turned everything off and sat on the floor of the back bedroom with her back against the radiator.

She thought, all through those four months, that the noise was the thing she had to survive.

Then the noise stopped, the way weather stops, and what was underneath it was not relief.

It was a Tuesday afternoon with nothing in it.

Here is what nobody warns you about, and it is the reason this is worth a whole message.

While the noise was going, she had a role. She was the person this was happening to. It was awful and it was also, in a way she is not proud of and does not need to be ashamed of either, a shape. There was something to be done every day: a message to answer or not answer, a decision, a call to take.

In the quiet there is no role at all. She is not the person it is happening to any more. She is just a woman in a house on a Tuesday, with a thing that happened, and no task.

And the quiet says something. That is the real trouble. It says: this is what you are now. It says: nothing is coming. It says: the interesting part of your life was that, and it is over, and this is the rest.

There is one more thing that belongs here.

The quiet is also, for some of the people who were hurt, the first peace they have had in a year. Her being out of the news is not a neutral fact for them; for one of them it is the reason she can go to the shop without being asked about it. That is not a thing to resent. That is a good outcome for a person who deserved one.

And this is where I stop writing about Isla, because you have been through your own quiet.

Maybe it has not come yet. Maybe it came a long time ago and never left. I am not going to ask what happened and I am not going to tell you the quiet is a reward.

What the quiet is for

I want to give you a verse that is famous for its beauty and is almost never read in its actual situation, which was a national emergency and a very public failure of judgement.

In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.Isaiah 30:15

Four words carry it. Returning, rest, quietness, confidence.

And the situation matters. Isaiah is speaking to people who had made a bad, public, widely known decision and were busy managing the consequences of it with a great deal of activity. The verse is not offered as a spa treatment. It is offered to people in the middle of a mess, as the actual strategy.

Now notice which two words are paired.

Quietness and confidence. Not quietness and endurance. Not quietness and patience, which is what everybody expects. Confidence is a word about knowing where you stand, and Isaiah puts it directly beside the silence.

Which means the silence is not the verdict you have been reading in it. Scripture does not treat quiet as the sound of a life being over; it treats quiet as the place strength is kept, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it that rather than a vacuum.

So take this on a Tuesday afternoon with nothing in it. You are being strengthened and not shelved, and Isaiah 30:15 says quietness and confidence together are your strength, and the Holy Spirit is doing that work in a house where the phone has not rung all day.

And there is one more mercy in the verse, hidden in the first pair. Returning and rest. Returning is movement toward God and rest is what happens when the movement stops being frantic. Neither of them is a performance, and neither requires an audience, and the written word puts both in a season with no role in it, which is exactly the season you are in.