Yahweh in the Silence.

God often makes His will clear to me. It’s not a grand vision or a dream or some natural phenomenon. It’s quieter, much quieter, below the hearing range of our ears, but it colors the timbre of a sound. Giving it breadth. Scope. Fullness. And the white and pink and brown noise is ordered by the carrier wave. Life brings plenty of noise. Even in silence, there’s still plenty of fears, distractions, reasons to turn back, warning signs, all the things our brains conjure up when we walk alone in the dark. But the low hum of God’s voice carries over the rocks and crags, around the leaves and trees shrouded in the shadow of the moon, and through the deafening noise of the creatures of night. That sweet, quiet, calming sound.

I rarely hear the voice of God. More often, I feel it. Sense it. God doesn’t often show His nature in the clap of the thunderbolt, or the droning whirl of the sandstorm, or the growling rumble of the wildfire, His voice is in the calm, cool, barely audible whisper of the spring breeze. You hear it in the quiet. Not the noise. God’s voice is heard in the peace. The moments that seem so insignificant that you want them to pass so that you can get to more interesting things. God speaks to people who quiet their hearts and minds and seek Him. The Japanese have a word. “Ma”, which means the space between moments. In Ma I hear God.

I find it damning then how loud our Protestant Churches are. Not a single moment of a Sunday Service is reserved for silence. We don’t even give God a moment to speak in His own church. We are drunk on our human wisdom, addicted to our half-baked ideas of who God could be, confused and stumbling around in the dark, begging God for Him to show us who He is, but we’ve never sat still to listen to His answer.

When Moses asked God who He was, He responded in a way no human then or now can truly understand. God breathed. The actual pronunciation of Yahweh has been lost to time, because the original authors of the Bible preserved its holiness by writing it without vowels, opting to record “YHWH” instead out of reverence. The reader would have seen the abbreviation and spoken “Adonai”, another one of God’s names, meaning Lord. Some scholars have speculated that YHWH was never meant to be said, but heard. YHWH, in Hebrew, would have represented the sound of a breath. God’s breath. And we are so busy and noisy and troublesome that we spend billions of dollars on podcasts, sermons, extravagant church auditoriums, counseling, therapy, mentorship, retreats, conferences, books, anything we can to hear God, looking for God’s voice everywhere other than the place He’s prepared for us to meet Him any time we want. All we need to do is set aside a moment of silence, and hear God’s name every time we breath.