For a long time I called things peaceful that were just quiet.
A hard conversation I never had. A question about God I stopped asking. A part of my life I labeled “settled” because it had stopped making noise. I told people I had peace about it. The truth is, I had silence about it. Those are not the same thing.
Quiet can mean the storm passed. It can also mean you turned the volume down so you would not have to deal with what was playing.
What this feels like
Most of us know the move. Something hurts, so we get busy. Something is unresolved, so we stop bringing it up. We say “I’ve given that to God,” and sometimes we have. Sometimes we just stopped looking at it.
And then there is the other kind of quiet: the kind where you actually do slow down, you actually do pray, and God does not seem to say anything back. No clear direction. No verse that jumps off the page. Just you, a chair, and a clock.
That one is harder, because you cannot fix it by trying harder. You can only sit in it.
If you have ever felt like you are doing all the right things and God is on mute, you are not broken. You are in a very old place. David wrote a good chunk of the Psalms from there.
What is actually going on
Here is what I am learning, slowly, and mostly against my will.
My problem was not that God was silent. My problem was that I only knew how to be loved when I was producing something.
Twenty-five years in ministry trains you to measure your closeness to God by your output. Sermons preached. People helped. Prayers that got results. When the output slows down, the closeness feels like it slows down with it. So you fill the silence with activity, because activity feels like proof.
But look at what the Father says over Jesus at His baptism. “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased” (Matthew 3:17). Jesus has not preached a sermon yet. No miracles. No disciples. Nothing on the resume. And the Father is already pleased.
Beloved before productive. That is the order. We keep trying to reverse it.
Brennan Manning put it this way: "Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. God's love for you and his choice of you constitute your worth." Not your output. His choice.
Psalm 46:10 in the CSB does not say “Be still.” It says, “Stop fighting, and know that I am God.” Stop fighting. Stop managing the outcome. Stop performing for a love that was settled before you woke up this morning.
And the silence? Elijah went looking for God in the wind, the earthquake, and the fire. God was not in any of them. He came in “a voice, a soft whisper” (1 Kings 19:12). Elijah had to get quiet enough to hear something that quiet.
Silence is not God’s absence. Sometimes it is His invitation to stop talking long enough to notice He is already in the room.
David puts it this way in Psalm 131: “I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother.” A weaned child is not with his mother for what she gives him anymore. He is just with her. That is contentment in God’s presence. Not getting something from Him. Being with Him.
What I am practicing (and mostly failing at)
None of this is dramatic. It is small and it is daily.
Name the fake peace. Write down one thing you have called “settled” that you have really just stopped talking about. One. Bring it back into the open with God.
Start the day as the beloved, not the employee. Before you ask God for anything, sit for two minutes with Matthew 3:17 as if it were said over you. In Christ, it is.
Give the silence a chair. Ten minutes, phone in another room, no agenda. If God speaks, good. If He does not, you are still with Him. That counts.
Read Psalm 131 out loud. All three verses. It takes about twenty seconds and it will reset you.
Tell one person. Fake peace lives in secret. Real peace can handle a witness.
Closing
I do not have this figured out. Some mornings the silence still feels like a locked door instead of an open one.
But I am done calling quiet “peace,” and I am done treating God’s silence like a performance review.
He was pleased with His Son before the work started. In Christ, He is pleased with you before yours does.
So, what have you been calling peace that is really just quiet?