Words from the Silence Part 1: Sea Planes and Stinky Chairs

This solitude retreat was so packed with experiences and words spoken to my heart that it’s going to take a few posts to relate even part of it all to you (sorry in advance if they’re long). It amazes me the richness of things that come out of a 24 hour vow of silence.

To begin, I attended the retreat with 12 other women and one man who served as our facilitator. We spent our time at a Catholic retreat center in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. It was a nice, simple place, and the people who run it get a kick out of protestants trying to practice silence (which is apparently a somewhat regular discipline for them).

We started off our time by talking about where we were in life as we walked into the retreat. It was kind of like asking where the red dot that says “You are here” was on our map. I’m a girl who likes analogies, so I told them I felt a little like a sea plane just then in my life. I’d better explain.

You know those sea planes with the huge floating skiffs on the bottom that seem like they’re never going to get off the water when they take off? I feel like one of those because it seems like things are very slowly taking off in my life right now. God’s sending me on a new journey of speaking and writing, and it’s really starting to happen. I feel like I’m finally lifting off the water!

At the same time, though, I feel like I’m burdened with things I can’t seem to shake: financial strain, struggles with self esteem, things that I seem to constantly wrestle with in my life. I wish I could just cut them loose because I feel like it would truly free me to take off and fly in other areas of my life, but I feel that God is telling me that I can’t lose them for a reason. Those floaters really weigh down the plane and make it hard to take off, but without them it wouldn’t be a sea plane. Without these struggles that I seem to battle over and over again, I wouldn’t be the exact same vessel that I am – the vessel God has created and asked to go on this specific journey of life.

So entering my time of solitude, I was really feeling this tension in my life of pulling against these burdens to lift them with me into this new stage of life. I described it as a good tension, but a tension nonetheless. I wasn’t sure how that would play into my time with the Lord, it simply was what I brought with me to that place.

From there we started our time alone. I went to my room, a tiny place big enough only for a single bed, a desk and a sitting chair. The very first thing I did was take a much needed nap. Then, the true silence began. I waited. I tried to pray, but was distracted by a faint odor of something rather organic. I checked the bottom of my shoes, but there were no presents there. I smelled my jeans…nope. The carpet? Uh-uh. Where was this smell coming from that consumed my every thought? I was supposed to be thinking about Jesus, and all I could think about was I don’t like walking in the yards of people who have dogs!

At last I found the culprit – it was the chair! Who knows why it smelled like that. There wasn’t anything on it, and it wasn’t even bad enough to stink up the room. You could only smell it when you sat there. So I moved, hoping that would help me concentrate. But even as I prayed, nothing was happening in my heart. It was as if God had taken His own vow of silence, which was very frustrating. Didn’t He know I was here to hear from Him? What was He waiting for?

I’d realize later that God was indeed waiting for something. He was waiting for dinner.