Blessed Quietness

Long ago, Carol and I used to do a lot of singing together. One of my favorites was a song called "Blessed Quietness." I had completely forgotten about it until I typed the title to this blog. The refrain goes like this:

Blessed quietness, holy quietness,
Blest assurance in my soul!
On the stormy sea Jesus speaks to me,
And the billows cease to roll.

These last few days have been blessedly quiet in my world. Max and I were commenting on it this evening. Other than a few football games, and some conversation between the two of us and varying phone calls, it's quite silent in our house most of the time.

Glorious Silence!

We know we're pretty fortunate and we also know that most people don't get much of a chance to experience this - especially when there are children in the household (of any age!). But, I turned the television off in my world last summer and though I watch some shows on our DVR, it's not on constantly, like it was for years.

One of the reasons I needed the white noise of the television was the high stress that I seemed to be under day to day. I could never get rid of it. The only thing that would put me to sleep was the noise from the television. If I woke in the middle of the night, my mind would immediately start chasing my fears and stress around and the only way to get my poor brain to re-focus on anything other than that was to allow it to become a vegetable again with television. I knew all of the night-time television shows and had watched some of the re-runs multiple times.

You can't imagine how thankful I am to be past that. Even though I stay up late at night, when I lay my head down on the pillow next to Max, I sleep. If I wake - even to get up and go to the bathroom - I can generally fall quickly back to sleep.

I know what a gift I have been given in the peace that I'm finding right now in my life.

Blessed quietness.