Waiting for the Room to Go Quiet

Let me ask you when you last prayed properly.

Not a quick word in the car. The other kind. Sat down, unhurried, with time in front of you.

For a lot of people the honest answer is a number of years, and it is not because they stopped believing in it. It is because they have been waiting for the conditions, and the conditions have not come.

That is the thing I want to look at, because somewhere along the way quiet stopped being a nice circumstance and became an entry requirement, and nobody made that decision out loud.

It happened by accident, mostly from good sources. Every book about prayer describes a quiet place. Every account of somebody's rich life with God includes an early morning and a chair. None of those writers intended to exclude anybody. But the picture accumulates, and after a while a person with a loud house concludes, without ever putting it in words, that the real thing is not currently available to them.

So they wait. And the waiting is respectful, and it is patient, and it has cost four years.

Where He was during the storm

Mark 4. There is a storm on the lake, a serious one, and the boat is filling with water. Experienced fishermen are frightened.

Here is where Jesus is.

And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? (Mark 4:38)

Asleep. In that.

I want to sit on this longer than people usually do, because it is normally read as a story about His power, and it is, and there is something else in it first.

Before He says a word to the wind, He is asleep in the middle of it. His rest is not produced by the calm. It comes before the calm, in conditions that terrified professionals, and it is not a lesser rest for having happened in a storm.

That order is the whole thing. Peace first, in the noise. The stilling afterward.

You are able to be settled before anything gets quieter, and the settling was never waiting on the conditions. Mark 4:38 has Him asleep in a storm before He says one word to it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as available rather than as something only He could do.

And then, when He does speak, notice what He says to them afterward.

And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith? (Mark 4:40)

Now I want to be careful with that, because it has been used badly for a long time, and I am not going to use it that way.

He is not scolding them for being frightened in a storm. He is pointing out that He was in the boat. The whole rebuke is about a fact they had available and were not using, which is that the person asleep at the back was the one who made the water.

He is not asking them to feel calmer. He is telling them where He was.

You are not being blamed for the storm, and there was never a charge against anybody for being frightened in one. Mark 4:40 points at a fact the men had rather than at a failure in them. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a hard sentence from landing as an accusation on somebody already tired.

He was in the boat the whole time

So the correction is not about producing a feeling. It is about a location.

He was in the boat during the storm, not after it. He was there while the water was coming in, while they were bailing, while nobody could hear anything.

Which means the presence that quiet was supposed to give access to has been in the loud room the entire time.

That is not a poetic way of putting it. It is the plain fact of the passage. The disciples were not lacking access. They were lacking a look over their shoulder.

You have His presence in the noise rather than after it, and He has been in the room the entire four years. Mark 4:38 puts Him in the boat during the storm rather than arriving once it was over, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land in somebody who has been waiting for permission.

And one plain thing before we go on, said once. If what is loud is not the house but something inside, and if some part of you has been thinking about not being here, tell one person today. In the United States you can call or text 988, at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, or one person whose number you know by heart. That is wisdom and God is entirely in it.

The one sentence version

I am not going to hand you a shortened quiet time, because a shortened version of the thing you cannot do is still a thing you cannot do.

I am going to hand you something different in kind.

Pray one sentence out loud in the noisiest room in your house.

Not silently. Out loud, in the kitchen with the television going and somebody asking about a bag, because the point is not to find a pocket of calm but to establish, physically, in your own hearing, that this room is a place where God is spoken to.

The sentence does not matter much. Lord, this is loud, and I am glad of Your presence in it.

What matters is the room it is said in.

You are permitted to speak to Him in the middle of the noise, and it was always going to be received. Mark 4:38 has the disciples talk to Him in a boat that is filling with water. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in one sentence said out loud over a running tap.