When I was in college my choice of major became a running joke between my dentist and me. Every six months he would try and make conversation and ask me about my major and seemingly every six months, I would have changed my major to something else.
I started out majoring in Social Studies Education, followed then by Linguistics, then Journalism, before finally settling on a double major of Creative Writing and Literature. The outlier among these majors would seem to be Social Studies Education, but in truth it fits perfectly with what I love. I wanted to be a social studies teacher because I loved history. I loved telling the stories of what happened to us in the past.
I love stories. It’s as simple as that. Perhaps I could even take it down to another level and say simply that I love words.
I love language. I love the beauty of the words. I love how rich and wonderful words can be. I love how words make me feel, how they warm my heart, or excite my soul. I love how sometimes when I read, I get so moved I have to close the book or turn off the Kindle and take a breath.
One of my favorite episodes of Friends has Joey revealing that when he read The Shining, he was so scared he had to hide the book in the freezer. When he and Rachel trade books—he gives her The Shining and she gives him Little Women, he is so moved by Little Women that too winds up in the freezer.
In Journalism class, we learned how to weight a sentence. Especially in journalism, when writing a news story, you want the most important facts to appear in the beginning of the sentence. So for example, you wouldn’t want to reveal the murderer’s name at the end of the sentence or the end of the paragraph or the end of the story. It's called burying the lead (or lede).
But even outside journalism, how we weight words is very important.
I was reminded of this when I was reading today’s psalm in church. Psalm 62:5 reads in the NRSV: “For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him.” It is a beautiful line, in and of itself, and far be it from me to criticize word placement, but I think (and I’ve blogged about this before) that the meaning, the impact, of this sentence changes if you flip three words.
“My soul waits in silence.”
As it is written, “my soul” is given the most weight, followed by “waits,” and ended with “in silence.”
The fact that we are waiting is given primary importance here.
But what if we flip some words?
What if we said: my soul in silence waits.
Now the importance shifts from the waiting to how we wait.
Such a minor thing, but do you see the difference?
We wait for God … in silence. The silent part is very important and easily forgotten when slipped in at the end there.
How do we wait? In silence.
We wait for Him at rest, calm like the sea on a windless day.
We wait for Him—in silence—in stillness, not wanting even to breathe and remembering 1 Kings 19:12: “And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.”
“A still small voice.”
The reason we wait in silence is so that we might hear that still small voice.
Two words—in silence. Pay them close attention. They may be all that stands between you and God.
