This
morning I tried to listen.
Around
4:30 A.M., while the rest of my family
was sleeping, I shut my laptop, closed the door of my study, turned off the
lights and sat, trying to listen.
Which
is harder than it sounds, at least for me.
You see, inside my head there is this constant conversation, an
unceasing dialogue with myself: planning, worrying, praying, reviewing class
notes, outlining sermons, anticipating questions from students, board members,
church members, and random dudes I talk to on the street, cross-referencing
Bible verses, revisiting conversations, praying, running hypothetical
scenarios, re-analyzing research, scolding myself over missed opportunities,
imagining, praying for a deeper prayer life.
I’m constantly producing all of this noise within myself.
This
morning I tried to shut up and just listen.
And
that’s when I began to see.
What
started off as pitch blackness in my study began to dissolve into shapes,
objects, even patterns on the dark comforter I’d wrapped around myself. Out of the darkness came light.
In
our narrative of the Genesis of creation we usually begin with God’s Words,
“Let there be light.” After all that was
the beginning of the first day. Only it
wasn’t. A Jewish day, a Biblical day,
doesn’t begin with morning. It begins
with night.
So the evening and the
morning were the first day. (Genesis 1: 5)
Before
the Voice and the light, there was the long, long evening of silence in the
dark.
The earth was without
form, and void; and darkness was
on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of
the waters. (Genesis 1: 2)
Before
God spoke, He listened.
And
to whom could He have been listening except Himself, the unceasing dialogue
within the Trinity. Before the light
emerged from the darkness and dissolved into lesser and greater lights, before
the darkness was broken into patterns of alternating night, God was there,
hovering above the liquid darkness. Not
flying, just hovering. Just sitting in
the dark, listening.
For
how long, did that first, long evening last?
For
how many of our centuries, millennia, and epochs, did God sit there planning,
thinking, imagining, anticipating, outlining prophecies, rehearsing answers to prayers,
running scenarios, sketching out creation in His head, worrying through the
necessary plan of redemption?
Psalm
104 says that when God holds court, He wears light like a robe of honor and
majesty. But when He needs to just be
with Himself, Psalm 18 says that He covers Himself in darkness and
thinks His secret thoughts.
He made darkness His
secret place;
His canopy around Him was dark waters
And thick clouds of the
skies.
(Psalm 18: 11)
It’s
a scary thing really to sit in darkness and listen. Without the noise and screens that distract us,
we face some things about ourselves that we’d rather not face alone at 4
something in the morning. But we need
to. If you and I are going to build and
become what God so carefully planned and created us to build and become then we
have to face the silence and the darkness because that has always been the way
that God brings forth Light.
Now
in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, Jesus went out and
departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed. (Mark 1: 35)
---Anderson
T. Graves II is a writer, community organizer and
consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.
Rev.
Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield,
Alabama; executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking
Organization (SAYNO); and director
of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human
Development (NIHD).
Subscribe
to my personal blog www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .
Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
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Support
by check or money order may be mailed to
Miles
Chapel CME Church
P
O Box 132
Fairfield,
Al 35064
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