thought exercise on Quiet Time

In the Critically acclaimed 2018 horror film A Quiet Place , Earth faces an alien invasion unlike any other. In the movie, the aliens behave like merciless monsters, using their lightning-fast sp...

In downtown Helsinki, there is a small building called the Kamppi Chapel. It’s not a place of worship, strictly speaking, but it’s as quiet as any cathedral. Quieter, in fact, because there are no ech...

In the midst of an exceedingly busy ministry Jesus made a habit of withdrawing to “a lonely place apart” (Matt. 14:13; see also Matt. 4:1-11, Luke 6:12, Matt. 14:23, Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31, Luke 5:16, M...

Your body knows about schedules. It gets used to those times of day when it says, Feed me right now. I’m hungry, and those times of night when it says, Get me to bed. I’m exhausted. Your body will spe...

The soul can also manifest physical symptoms of need. I like to think of it this way: Just like my stomach growls when I’m hungry for physical food, my spirit tends to growl when I’m in need of spirit...

Conforming to boundary markers too often substitutes for authentic transformation. The church I grew up in had its boundary markers. A prideful or resentful pastor could have kept his job, but if eve...

In his excellent book on worship, The Dangerous Act of Worship , pastor and president of Fuller Seminary Mark Labberton shares a story of the transformation of one of his former congregants: Ben ...

Some time back, a retired missionary dropped by our church. She had served faithfully in Africa, and one day, she happened upon a small baptismal service. A fellow missionary took three new converts t...

In the midst of an exceedingly busy ministry Jesus made a habit of withdrawing to “a lonely place apart” (Matt. 14:13; see also Matt. 4:1-11, Luke 6:12, Matt. 14:23, Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31, Luke 5:16, M...

The fascination with silence took root early in the life of composer John Cage. In 1928, during a speech contest at Los Angeles High School, he argued for the establishment of a national day of quiet....

It was a time like this,  war and tumult of war,  a horror in the air. Hungry yawned the abyss— and yet there came the star  and the child most wonderfully there. It was a time like this ...

Think back over your life and try to remember a place where you felt safe and at peace, a time when you felt relaxed and okay. It could be an outdoor place—like on a beach or sitting in a tree. Maybe ...

The problem we face today needs very little time for its statement. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnigh...

We must tune our ears to hear God’s voice. It’s like the child who was told by his father during a symphony orchestra concert, “Listen for the flutes in this song. Don’t they sound beautiful?” The chi...

Anthony Bloom tells the story of an elderly woman who had been working at prayer with all her might but without ever sensing God’s presence. Wisely, the archbishop encouraged the old woman to go to he...

While there is a common assumption in church circles that God speaks most frequently and the clearest through singing worship and heart-enlivened sermons, I find the context of speechless tranquility ...

For the most part, contemporary Christians pay little attention to the Sabbath. We more or less know that the day came to reflect, in U.S. culture, the most stringent disciplinary faith of the Puritan...

In the film Of Gods and Men , director Xavier Beauvois tells the story of a small group of mostly French monks living in Algeria during a time of civil unrest. These monks live a life of quiet fideli...

For many of us, silence is something we try to avoid, both in conversations and in preaching. But as Richard John Neuhaus aptly describes in his time watching Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his sermo...

In the midst of a busy schedule of activities—healing suffering people, casting out devils, responding to impatient disciples, traveling from town to town, and preaching from synagogue to synagogue—we...

In the wilderness, life is stripped of distractions. It is quiet. The topography demands discipline, simplicity, and fierce attention. Solitude in the wilderness makes irrelevant all the people-pleasi...

I was sixteen when a white deputy sheriff shot and killed my twenty-five-year-old brother, Clyde, in New Hebron, Mississippi, where we had grown up. Clyde had returned home from fighting in World War ...

A benediction. When all is said and done, these are the final thoughts we are left with. These are God’s words to God’s people. These are the good words of blessing God would like you to have stuck in...

As a stranger walked down a quiet residential street, he noticed a man struggling with a washing machine at the doorway of his house. The homeowner was clearly having a hard time, so the passerby, wan...

The Bruderhof is one such Christian community with many locations around the world. Unlike most such attempts to build radical communities, the Bruderhof has not only survived, it is thriving. In 2021...

In Circle of Quiet , Madeleine L’Engle describes how her young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time was dismissed by eight publishers before it eventually landed with the publishing house of Farra...

A few years ago, a journalist named Joseph Blackman wrote an Op Ed on an interesting subject, “Why Clubs are Dark.” That is, why is it when you walk into a nightclub or a bar, the lights are off, or a...

I pastored a church in the Chicago area for almost fifteen years. During the worship service one Sunday morning the ushers came forward to receive the offering, and one of the ushers was asked to pray...

The day after Christmas would normally have been a quiet day in Washington, D.C., above all on Capitol Hill. But December 26, 1941, was different. It was only nineteen days after the Japanese attack o...

Even though Carl Jung first introduced the terms introvert and extravert back in 1921 (in his now-classic volume Psychological Types), the concepts—especially introversion—crashed into the public’s co...