Some of you know that I’ve been retired for two months and have been wondering what I’ve been up to. Well, some art, some grandchildren and a lot of silence.
Over the past 12 months, God has erased three significant responsibilities from the white board of my life and brought me into a season of stillness and solitude – a blank space, so to speak. I was surrounded by people to help, problems to solve, answers to give, meetings to run to, places to go, projects and deadlines. Then I woke up July 1 and, poof, I was nobody and didn’t need to be anywhere. At week three, I felt a downshift and slowing on the inside. It’s very disorienting and redefining but gloriously freeing. And it’s an odd mix of grieving losses with joyous anticipation.
A dear friend recently reminded me of a quote from Oswald Chambers: When God gives you a blank space, don’t fill it in. So, I have been doing a lot of listening and contemplation and leaving the blank space blank.
Yesterday as I read from II Corinthians 3, verse 18 jumped off the page and grabbed me: And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
David Benner wrote, “Contemplation is a way of opening our self to the ineffable – to something that is beyond us and upon which we gaze with awe.” He described it as “leaning toward God in faith with longing, openness and love.”[1] This contemplative quiet and openness to the ineffable has been transforming. God has brought me into a deeper knowing of Him. But, to my surprise, the path also wound through hidden places of my own soul.
I sought an encounter with God, but I first encountered the unwhole parts of me hiding in the shadows. Yet it was the encounter with my unwholeness that revealed how truly wide and long and high and deep is His love for me. He gently embraces me just as I am in my weakness and insecurity, and loves me too much to leave me there. His unconditional compassionate love for all of me is absolutely staggering.
In the contemplative quiet, He transforms me from the inside out to look and think and live more and more like Christ. So, I wait in the blank space and listen and gaze with awe upon the Eternal Majesty. In His perfect timing, He will show me the next step.
When God gives you a blank space in your day, your week or your life, you might want to resist the temptation to fill it in.
[1] Benner, D. G. (2010). Opening to God, Lectio Divina and Life as Prayer. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press.