The Potential Blessing of Solitude

Snow is beautiful!  What a glorious God is our God to create something so bright and cold!  Why white?  Why not brown or grey?  Perhaps because He intended to use snow as a graphic illustration of how completely the grace of Christ cleanses and renews all who believe in Him confessing their sins with sorrow?

One of the blessings and liabilities of snow, at least in the South, is that it tends to stop everything.  That can be a problem.  Those whose jobs cannot be halted, as in emergency personnel, no doubt find snow to be something of a burden.  When snow prevents the church from gathering, as it does today, that is a burden  because we very much need the public means of grace.  We need to be together as God’s family on earth, in this place.  We need to worship together and to hear the Word of God together.  Perhaps not being able to meet together will be used of God to sweeten our taste for Sundays in His house!

But, then there are blessings in being stopped from our hurry and busyness!  It is a blessing not to be able, without unnecessary risk, to go anywhere.  It is a blessing to be shut up to our families.  Perhaps we will rediscover, if need be, the enjoyment of marital and family fellowship.  Perhaps we will talk about things that we seem too busy to trouble with in our ordinary days.  All this is good, a great blessing, as is enforced rest.

Solitude can also be a tremendous benefit, if we put it to spiritual use. 

Psalm 46:10 Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.

I suspect these inspired words are familiar to most of us.  But, how few of us practice stillness in order to know God as God!  Stillness is strange to us.  Our lives are defined by rush and noise.  Everyday it is here and there…go, go, go…hurry you are late…no time for this, for that…rush.  And, everywhere we go there is noise.  The noise of talk.  The noise of machines.  The noise of music (and I love music, but sometimes it gets in the way of serious thought).  Stillness, do we know what it is? No rush, no noise, stillness.  How seldom do we experience it until we fall asleep from utter exhaustion.  To be still and fully awake, that is a rare thing for most of us.

Yet, being still is of no real benefit to our souls unless we energize our souls to take advangtage of the opportunity afforded by stillness to meditate on God and on all that God may be saying to us.  The Psalmist provides several things to think upon in Psalm 46:  he wants us to imagine all sorts of severe troubles–I mean really severe troubles like the earth being removed and the mountains cast into the seas; then he wants us to imagine a refuge of perfect safety; but not only a hiding place of safety, also rivers of gladness in the middle of the trouble.  The refuge is God.  The rivers which make glad in the day of trouble flow from the special presence of God in the midst of His chosen city.  For New Covenant believers that translates into God’s presence in our souls by the unique indwelling of the Holy Spirit and by His wonderful visitations into our corporate gatherings.  The psalmist wants that we should ponder these things in our stillness.  The worst trouble imaginable (not comforting, yet not far away).  He wants to use our imaginations with respect to those feelings of fear and panic and sorrow and woe which we so much dread.  Be still and imagine.  You have been in such places of grief and dread.  Remember and feel.  Now, imagine being in a place of complete protection and peace as the trouble breaks around you.  A horrible tornado is blowing to pieces everything you can see; yet, in the midst of it, you feel not even a breeze, just calm and peace.  But, imagine more.  Imagine that in the storm you are actually enjoying this most wonderful inner gladness.  There is inexplicable rejoicing, although the world (your world) is being ripped apart by the winds.  It is hard to imagine such.  We must have stillness and time in order to enter into the world we are summoned to imagine by the psalmist (the Holy Spirit).

The message from God to His people is that such is His power and such is His commitment to us that He can be to us both the refuge and the gladness when the worst trouble comes.  More than that, we do not need wait for trouble to come, sufficient unto the day is its own peculiar troubles.  Right now, we may experience the calm of His protection and the joy of His presence.  He is with us through Christ.  He is our refuge now.  The rivers of His love flow in us now.  We must believe in Him.  We must train our souls to believe in Him now.  The day of peace is the time to train our souls to believe and rejoice so that when the day of trouble comes we are in the blessed habit of experiencing our rest in Christ.

Snow days can be blessed days if they result in being still and listening to God as He speaks to us by His Word.  One of the things I enjoy most about Southern snows is venturing out late at night and listening.  There is utter silence.  Few humans are out and about.  The snow seems to insulate from all echoes and noise.  It is quiet.  A wonderful opportunity for productive solitude.