Teaching | The Solitude Practice | The Quiet Place E01

Hello and welcome. My name is Yinka Dathan and I'm the host of Practice in the Way with John Mark Homo, a podcast featuring teachings and conversations with John Mark and other voices to help us journey into a deeper life with God. Today we begin a new series of teachings on the ancient practice of solitude, shared by John Mark, invented church in Los Angeles, California. The series explores how we can step away from the noise of modern life and into the steel, peaceful presence of God. In this teaching John Mark explains what true solitude with God is, what it isn't and what might be waiting for us if we follow Jesus into the quiet place. If you'd like to continue exploring what it means to build a life with God and solitude, we have good news for you. John Mark's newest book Into the Quiet is now available for pre-order. We invite you to secure your copies in the link in the episode description and to discover how you can step out of the chronic noise of our world and into the presence of the God of Peace. Lastly, work out funded nonprofits for everything we make, including this podcast, it's completely free because it's already been paid for by the circle and other givers. Thank you all for your generosity. If you'd like to join these friends in the circle, visit practiceintheway.org/generous. Now here's John Mark with today's teaching on the quiet place. Good morning, everybody. There you are. Great to see you and your shining face. It is a delight to be with you. Please turn your bibles to Luke chapter 5. Last time I was with you was for the community practice and it is right I'm fitting that next up is the solitude practice. I believe that community and solitude are like the twin pillars of the spiritual life, the two legs by which we travel the way of Jesus together. The trick is that most of us kind of intuitively get our need for community but we're less in touch with our need for solitude or quite honestly we like have the opposite of a felt need for solitude. We have a aversion or anxiety over it and that makes perfect sense. We'll talk about that in the weeks to come but why solitude? Why this practice? There is a laundry list of reasons that we'll get into over the next few weeks. Let's just start with an obvious one. You live we live in a very noisy city. Am I right? It was a lovely drive in this morning along the PCH but man there were airplanes overhead on the way to LAX and helicopters and UFOs apparently and their delivery trucks bleeping at 6.15 in the morning on a Sunday and it's just noisy out there. Scientists are beginning to sound the alarm on a new emerging kind of toxin in our environment that they call noise pollution. The WHO just named it as the second worst environmental toxin after air pollution beating out oil and gas because of its impact on the human body and the science is fairly simple like if you think about your body it's designed by God or evolution or whatever both to you we were created for quieter soundscapes. If you were out with gear wherever he is this weekend I don't know that he's still is in this church because he's never here when I'm here but if you were out backpacking with gear in the wild it would not be silent you would hear bird song and wind in the tree and beauty but if there was a loud sound the odds are very high that it would be something dangerous. Very little in nature is loud and safe it is likely a tsunami or a hurricane or a tornado or thunder and lightning or predator leaping out of the bush to eat you alive and so your body has been designed in such a way that sound over a certain decibel range it perceives as a threat immediately before you can even process it with your prefrontal cortex goes straight down your spine through your central nervous system to activate your alarm system your fighter flight system which is why when you're driving down the 405 and somebody who's so fast and so furious just rips by you with that illegal muffler that the police do not actually enforce your brain may know that is not Vin Diesel that is like a 59 year old software engineer who just got a payout and bought that car and your brain knows I have nothing to be scared of but your body all it feels is threat threat threat threat so you get off the freeway you walk in your apartment door and you feel that weird mix of like wiped and on edge at the same time because your body has just been fighting off saber-toothed tigers all the way down the 405 and that's just the auditory noise of our culture we're not even dealing yet with like the noise of our culture opinion and outrage and anxiety and fear mongering and news alerts and wake up one morning and there's war and then you wear a church and reprint like just the everybody has an opinion about everything that incessant wall of noise words opinion sounds fears dooms it just comes at and it does a violence to the soul and often even in our life together as the people of God we're pretty noisy aren't we? we love sermons and don't worry I'm still going to preach one but we love words we worship God to the literal clanging of symbols and there's such a right and fitting place for that shout for joy to the Lord all the earth sing and gladness oh it's good but we can spend two hours together and barely take a breath much less sit before the God of silence and in the same way we'll talk about this that we need to be together to experience the life of the kingdom of God we also need to be alone in the quiet with God this morning we are reading from Luke chapter 5 verse 15 and 16 yet the news about Jesus spread all the more so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their illnesses but Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed January 27th 1956 Dr. King is sitting in his kitchen in the middle of the night and he is about to give up this was still early in the civil rights movement and Dr. King was not yet widely known as he is today he had been brought into Montgomery Alabama to lead the boy bus cot following Rosa Parks active courage but as the boycott dragged on the kind of iron of the mob literally was more and more kind of beginning to focus in on its new leader and he was fearing not only for his own life but he was with his wife and his young daughter the day before Dr. King had been arrested and jailed and thrown in prison overnight for driving 30 miles per hour in a 25 mile per hour zone that morning he was released but he came home to another round of threatening phone calls and the evening of the 27th he could not fall asleep so he got out of bed went into his kitchen he made a pot of coffee sat down at the little table in the kitchen that and he began to pray in the quiet years later on a sermon he told the story this way and I bowed down over that cup of coffee I never will forget it I prayed a prayer and I prayed out loud that night I said Lord I'm down here trying to do what's right but Lord I must confess that I'm weak now I'm faltering I'm losing my courage and it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me Martin Luther stand up for righteousness stand up for justice stand up for the truth and low I will be with you even to the end of the world and his biography of Dr. King the Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Lewis argues that this was the defining moment in Dr. King's life and as a result in the civil rights movement overall in the life of our nation and certainly we still have a long ways to go on the same journey but it was a before and after moment sitting in the kitchen in the middle of the night I imagine the sound of circadas outside the door I heard an inner voice but imagine a hypothetical situation what if Dr. King had an iPhone same story transposed to 2026 what if he sat down with this cup of coffee and just disappeared into acts where he got into it without angry troll or Elon Musk himself just going back and forth in the middle of the night that could happen. We're starting working on his next TikTok video just kind of bearing his soul moody, dark background, candle flickering to the side, bearing his soul to the internet. We're just like got a text from his EA and sort of this late night flurry working on whatever or reading the news and just fuming over the op-ed by that politician or what if you just started asking chat no he would use Claude to help him formulate the right you know give me a political strategy to overcome injustice with the sermon on the mount inspired by Gandhi with a little like what if you were to start giving it prompts or what if he just had a TV remote and started binging the new season of shrinking would there have been a doctor king would he have ever been able to hear God's voice in the quiet and from it draw not only on the strength and clarity of conviction but the direction and call to do what needed to be done or would he have been another nameless faceless automaton sucked into the black hole of the digital age hypothetical situation that image was made by Claude thank you but it has me thinking about our very real situation as the first generation to apprentice under Jesus in the digital age what if the greatest threat to the Christian faith today to your faith today isn't secularism but distraction what if it's not post Christianity or Harry see or ideology from the right or from the left but it's just another news alert on your phone we live in an era where it is possible to go through your entire life and never really be in solitude because even when we're alone we're on our phone or we're on the internet or we're in our inbox or we're in our entertainment queue the cultural critic cal newport in his excellent book digital minimalism writes it is now possible to completely banish solitude from your life some of you are thinking great I like this this is helpful the moment we are ever alone get back to our apartment late at night claps into our bed the glowing rectangle of death is there to sue all of our anxiety while stoking up new ones our devices keep us tethered to the world of noise and I would argue that the threat of all this noise and digital distraction and overstimulation and anxiety inducing agitation is not just to your mind and your mental health it's not just to your heart and your well-being it's not even just to your body with noise pollution it is to your soul how many moments with God like the one Dr. King had in his kitchen have you and I missed where God wanted to speak or was speaking and there was an inner voice but it was drowned out and we missed the possibility of the moment is there a practice from the way of Jesus that could position you and I to hear Jesus voice right in the midst of all the noise of LA and the world we call home yes it is the practice of solitude silence and stillness that night in his kitchen Dr. King was tapping into a practice that is all over the life of Jesus look again if your Bible is still open at Luke chapter 5 verse 15 the news about Jesus spread all the more so this is early in Jesus' work you know we're five chapters in it's just beginning to spread word is out he's growing in popularity so that crowds of people came near him thousands of people would literally like go find him in the wilderness and sit down on the grass and hear his teaching and to be healed of their illnesses not just to hear a lecture but to encounter the in-breaking kingdom of God through the king himself Jesus but what did Jesus do 16 he started a branding agency to get his message even further out into the world now Jesus often with drew to lonely places and he prayed the phrase lonely places is a single word in Greek it's the word array moss can you say that well done and there's all sorts of ways to translate array moss into English can be translated the wilderness or the wild place it's often translated the desert but it doesn't mean like hot and sandy it can be translated the deserted place or the desolate place or the remote place or the secluded place or the solitary place or here's my personal favorite the quiet place again this is first century Israel it's very different kind of landscape than Southern California Jesus you know in here where we live you landed LAX and it's just urban sprawl as far as the eye can see until it just fades into smog right but Jesus world the vast majority of people were living in small rural villages of a few hundred people farming on small plots of land all within walking distance of the local synagogue even a town or a city would have been very small by our estimation today and outside of cappernum or Nazareth where Jesus grew up outside of your village and the kind of local farming community were vast uninhabited tracks of land with nothing out there that were called the array moss no buildings no roads no infrastructure no cell phone service no Wi-Fi no people just empty open space array moss Jesus would regularly disappear out into that space there are these stories in the gospels where the disciples would like wake up and Jesus bed would be empty and he would have gotten up early in the morning like where where did he go or they would go to bed at night and his bed would be empty again and he's out on a mountain somewhere all by himself wandering around just in the quiet with God he did this all of the time Luke writes he often withdrew listen to a few alternate translations of the same Greek line Jesus himself frequently withdrew to the wilderness and prayed or Jesus often slipped away to be alone so he could pray or here's Eugene Peterson as often as possible Jesus withdrew to out of the way places for prayer when you read the four gospels which are Matthew Mark looking John right you just read story after story of Jesus all alone out in nature in prayer let me give you just a few examples immediately after his baptism we read Jesus was led by the spirit into the array moss the wilderness where he spent 40 days in prayer and fasting all alone immediately upon his return in Mark's story he goes to the synagogue to preach the first day this is long marathon day preaching healing the sick into the night and then the next morning we read quote very early in the morning while it was still dark Jesus got up left the house went back out to the array moss a solitary place where he prayed 40 days one day on the job back before choosing the twelve apostles we read Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray and spent the whole night praying to God after feeding the 5,000 Jesus sent his own disciples away he dismissed the crowds and he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray when evening came he was there what alone after his cousin John the baptizer died we read he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place likely to grieve when the populous crowds tried to crown him king and launch a revolution what did he do he withdrew again by a mountain by himself I mean this is just a small sampling I could go on and on when you read through the story of Jesus you notice this clear distinct unmistakable pattern of what I would call retreat and return Jesus would retreat into solitude he'd get a way from the crowds and the people and the demands and the opinions and the praise and the criticism and the responsibility and the I need this and I need that we're hungry get away from all of that we just go out into solitude and just be with God to rest to pray to hear God's voice but he was no hermit the longest we have on record that Jesus was away was 40 days that was one time after that the longest we have on record is like less than 24 hours it's often just a long morning he get up before the sunrise and the disciples would find him by lunchtime a half day or something like that or just a night in prayer to God and then he would return to be with people in community and to love and serve and you see Jesus toggle back and forth between solitude and community retreat and return now as I said most of us intuitively get our need for community right that we have this built-in need for relationality if you're Christian and you're aware of Christian theology and you've read through Scripture, you kind of get that God is not a [BLANK_AUDIO] solo being, he's like a community of love that his father and son are holding spirit. God is a kind of relationship. That is the central reality, the center of the universe, to be a Christian, to be alive in the intimacy at the center of the universe. And so we're made in the image of God and we are made with this built-in need for relationality for family, for community. We follow Jesus together. That's why you're here on a Sunday morning when you could be sleeping in or whatever. But we're often less in touch with our equal and just as important need for quiet. We're also designed by God, who the mystics for 2,000 years have called the God of silence. I mean, think about God's existence. I'm no scientist, but whatever the percentage of the universe is, 99.9999, that is absolutely silent. You all know that, right? Like Star Wars where the X-wing blows up and you hear the explosion, you understand this like scientifically would not happen, right? There's no air waves in space. It would be utterly, eerily silent. The universe is filled with the glory and the presence of God. God is in nebula that the Hubble telescope could only dream of seeing. He's there now rejoicing over his creation, loving, blessing, giving life to who knows. And it's absolutely silent. And we're created in the image of this God, the need for quiet, retreat, beauty and communion. Many of us today are trying to find a path to God that doesn't ever require us to be alone, quiet, or away from our devices, or away from our stack of books and our journal and our thoughts and our podcasts and our sermons. Maybe we're drawn to solitude or maybe not, but either way there's a push, pull, a desire and a fear at the same time. Which is why your mind is likely starting to raise all sorts of objections that are perfectly reasonable. You don't get it. I'm an extrovert. You're right. I don't get you at all. But, or hey, I live a busy life. You would not understand. I'm a parent. I have a two-year-old. Or my job starts early. Or you don't understand. I'm kind of a morning workout person or whatever it is, or isn't this just another form of privilege? Or this is just not even reasonable for a modern person living in L.A. or what's the big deal with the phone or et cetera, et cetera. But again, Luke 5, verse 16, "Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. Jesus often withdrew." And I mean, he was Jesus like you think you're busy? You think your two-year-old is hard? Have you read about the twelve disciples? Grown men can be even harder. You think your life is demanding as an executive, as an artist, as a small business owner, as a youthful in the blank. He was Jesus. People were literally clinging to him, digging holes through the roof just to get to him, screaming at him, plotting to murder him or enthrone him. He was Jesus. And yet, in spite of that demand, or could it be because of that demand, he would regularly slip away. In fact, you can chart Jesus' life on an axis of demand and withdrawal. You get the clear impression when you read through the gospels and the progression that the more in demand Jesus became, the more he would disappear into the quiet. Almost all of us are exactly the opposite, right? Maybe this is the season of our life when we have margin, maybe when we're young or we're single, I just cannot but chuckle with my college-aged son just talks about how busy he is. I'm like, oh yeah, you're unemployed and have five classes and live on campus. Just sounds exhausting, wow, you know, wait till you're my age and your weekend is like three and a half hours long, you know? But maybe there's a season in your life where you have margin and your pace is a little bit slower and in that season, there's just a beautiful regular practice, quiet, a prayer, and then the moment the new project comes and the new job or you have a baby or you get married or you move to an apartment or you fill in the blank, it just goes out the window. For Jesus, it was the exact opposite. St. Francis DeSales, many consider the best spiritual director and true history and his writings have really impacted me. He used to quit that every Christian needs to spend thirty minutes a day in prayer except for when they're really busy and then you need a full hour. And there's humor in that certainly, but there's wisdom in it too. It seems that Jesus, the more in demand he became, the more he would go away. We have, again, the stories of the disciples literally going out like in Mark 1 on search parties for Jesus, like wake up, he's gone, they go out into the air and it's okay, you check over that hill, you look down on that ravine, I think there's some caves over there, he's a sucker for caves, go look in the caves, and they're out searching for Jesus. Now this pattern in Jesus' life of retreat and return has come to be called in a modern Christian spirituality, the practice or spiritual discipline of solitude. Hey everybody, John Mark care. I have a new book coming out on October 6th called Into the Quiet, Following Jesus in a World of Noise. We live in a very noisy world and a growing number of people are just exhausted by the sheer volume of modern life, both literally in the soundscapes of modern cities and suburbs, but also culturally in the daily digital deluge of outrage and anxiety and drama and distraction. How do we hear the still small voice of God amid the noise of the modern age? This book really picks up where the ruthless elimination of hurry left off and my prayer is for readers to hear the gentle age old invitation of Jesus to come away from all the noise and busyness and overstimulation of our world and step into the quiet to experience the love of God, prior to today wherever books are sold. To start, let me clarify what solitude is not. So first off, it's not loneliness, Richard Foster in celebration and discipline writes loneliness is inner emptiness, solitude is inner fulfillment, loneliness is a felt absence, solitude is not, it's more like a felt presence. Secondly, it's not isolation, Wayne Cidero from Hawaii writes there is a difference between isolation and solitude. They contain similar characteristics, but in reality they are worlds apart. Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first. We all have friends who have isolated, right, who have kind of began to drift away from us from community, from church, and that story never ends well, whether it's because of trauma or fear or sin or temptation or a push or pull to another, that story never ends well. Solitude is not that, it's not isolation, it's a movement toward relationship. Finally, it's not loneliness, this is really important, listen carefully. When social scientists study the effect of solitude on the nervous system, on the human being, they have to distinguish, when I got under the literature on this, it was really interesting. They pretty much all distinguish between solitude and loneliness. Aloneness is what we introverts just love. It's when you're not with other people who are so exhausting, God bless them. You're just alone, but you may be texting other people or watching other people on TV or reading a book by another person and listening to a podcast by another person or making dinner or holding laundry or emailing with another person like you may be doing any number of things that are full of distraction. You're just not with other people. That's not solitude. This is a crucial distinction because many people mistakenly write off solitude as an optional spiritual discipline for introverts who are into that sort of thing. And if all of us introverts did that with community, yeah, community, okay, whatever. That's kind of, I'm not an extrovert, that's not really my thing. I'm just going to kind of do my own thing with God. Anybody with a modicum of spiritual maturity, wherever they fall in the introvert, extrovert spectrum would say, man, you are missing out on a whole dimension of the kingdom of God and you're playing with fire. Yet a lot of us don't think the same way about solitude. And it's a tragedy not just for extroverts who write it off and cut it out of their life, but it's a tragedy for introverts too. Because solitude is then warped and diminished and denuded into kind of a little me time for introverted dad who's burned out on people and just wants to be alone and read his book or do whatever he does. That does nothing but deepen my bondage to narcissism, not liberate me to love and to serve. In reality, this was fascinating to me, but study after study shows that once you distinguish between solitude and aloneness, introverts have no higher desire for or enjoyment of solitude than extroverts. This practice has nothing to do with introversion and extroversion. And wherever you fall in that spectrum, you are not behind or ahead. So if solitude is not aloneness or isolation or loneliness, what is it? Very simply, the practice of solitude is intentional time in the quiet with ourselves and God. That's why it's not the same things aloneness. You're not alone. You're with God. Saint Jerome 4th century translator of the Vulgate, the first translation of the Bible into Latin that's still used in corners of the church, said we are never less alone than when we are alone. One way to think about solitude is as getting yourself into a place where you are free of all other inputs. The only inputs into your mind and your ears are God and your own heart before God. Nobody texting you, nobody talking to you, not reading from anybody, not listening to anybody, just you, God, your heart. No other inputs. That is solitude. Which is why solitude has two companions. You could think of it as kind of a three-legged stool. Silence and stillness. Silence is pretty self-explanatory. Of course, there are two dimensions to silence. There's exterior silence where you quiet the noise outside of you, so you're not, somebody said to me recently, like, man, I was listening to an elevation worship at the coffee shop while I was doing solitude the other day, and I was just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. Wait a minute. Think maybe you and I are using this word differently, right? You're not in a coffee shop. There's no earbuds in your head. There's no chimes or push notifications from your phone. It is quiet. But the second dimension, that's actually much harder is interior silence. Where you tempt, and this is easier said than done, it takes a heck of a lot of practice to quiet the incessant noise of your mind, that just incessant stream of thought after ID, after worry, after perception, after squirrel, after fear, after anxiety, after envy, after, oh, I like that new purse. After, what if I bought that car? After I hate that person, after I can't believe you. That, that, call dream. It's not just you, that's the human brain. You attempt to quiet that. What the psychologist Ethan Cross calls shatter or negative rumination. You just let it fade away, like the fog burning off on a Santa Monica morning. This in turn is designed to lead you to really the tell us stillness. The Eastern Orthodox Bishop Galistos where it was a student of C.S. Lewis and lovely writer, defines stillness this way. Stillness is a state of inner tranquility or mental quietude and concentration. Not simply silence, but an attitude of listening to God and of an openness to God. It's coming to a place where, you know, what did Jesus say, let not your heart be troubled? Where the waters of your heart are not troubled or agitated or anxious or angry, they're like a, like a still glassy lake early in the morning in the mountains. You see, get off to the side. I'm just getting, just still quiet calm, but it's not just mental quietude. A lot of the contemplative writers talk about prayer as loving attentiveness to God. It's just Jesus, I love you, I love you. I receive your love, I give your love, I share in your love, but it's that without words. It's just loving attentiveness, but it's more than just attentiveness. It's a heart posture. That's not just open to God and peaceful, but it's a heart of surrender, heart of yield and a heart of God here. Again, without words, just here I am. Give you everything, I give you everyone, I give you all that is in me and under me and behind me good and bad and ugly. I just quietly offer it to you. And the idea is that you go into solitude, you all churned up in your mind racing and your heart troubled. And if you stay with it, if you follow that thread long enough, the goal is to come to a place of stillness. And most of the great ones of the way of Jesus down through church history, and don't take my word for it, read your way backward through the history of the church. You will just see this as a major, dominant reoccurring theme. You will see so many of saints and sages and bishops and writers and theologians and ordinary people all say this is one of the most important of all of the disciplines for the spiritual life. And we now, and once said, without solitude, it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. We do not take the spiritual life seriously, if we do not set aside some time to be with God and to listen to him. As very blunt and direct language, I can't quite say that to you. You would all hate me even more. But he's Henry now and when you're Henry now and you can kind of say whatever you want. So I can quote Henry now and to you. It's very passive-aggressive, but we're West Coast people, we do that well. You don't take the spiritual life seriously, quote. If you do not set aside some time to be with God, what if I told you my wife were coming up on 25 years this June? What if I said, I love my wife so much. How often are you too alone, never? I mean, sometimes in bad late at night, but we're both on our phones. We kind of chat as we're like going through Instagram. How do I think that's cool? Yeah, that's cool. That's the, by the way, that's not what we actually do. I just want to clarify, we're not that couple, but you're like, wait, I am, you would say, first off, I would not be married 24, almost 25 years, would have ended a long time ago and you would say, that's not a marriage, that's something else. That's not union with God, that's something else. Your relationship to God and to your own soul is the same. And to clarify, the Aramaus is not just a place, it's also a practice. You don't have to go out to the deserts of Judea, right? In fact, that's not a great time to do that, actually. Or out into Joshua Tree on a four-day, solo backpacking trip, so that may be a fantastic idea. But you can practice this in your daily life, just walk into a park down the street from your house, or getting up early before your kids or your roommates, and just getting 20 minutes to just breathe before God, or staying up late, or booking a cheap Airbnb up in idle wild for the weekend, just going by yourself and powering off your phone, and bringing your journal, your Bible, and your heart, sleeping, resting, listening, walking, considering the birds, or Dr. King, just staying up late at night in your kitchen with a pot of coffee, and no glowing rectangle. Just you and God. My wife and I are very different, and we're through two therapists who both said were the most opposite couple they've ever worked with. They did not mean that as a compliment. She's very extroverted and has a rich, rich, deep spiritual life, and spends a lot of time in solitude. And, but how she does it, it's very different than me. She's not journal. She likes to stay up late, it's literally happened last night. I'm climbing into bed at nine o'clock at night, and she's putting on her jacket, 'cause she goes out on our deck, we live up in the mountains, turns on our fire pit, lights up a cigar, puts her phone away, and smokes a cigar by herself with God. Now, I think cigars are just but nasty. I think they wreak, it is the opposite is sexually attractive, and I think it is adorable that she does this. She just goes out, she said to me yesterday, she's like a different person on the other side. She came and she woke me up in the middle of the night, 1236 in the morning. She's coming into bed, wreaking of cigar smoke, climbing into bed, but a full of joy. You can just feel the joy in her. She would say at the beginning of that cigar, her mind is just all over, her heart is all over, and by the time she's at the end, she's normally in union with Jesus. Now she has ADHD, she's an extrovert, she's got little kids and morning drop off in a busy life and a job so she's found her way. The family goes to bed, her grumpy husband is old already and goes to bed at 8.45 at night so she just gets her kids asleep, locks up the phones and goes out under the sky and just sits there with God. You find your way. You find how my buddy Steve's a super active guy, literally runs like an outdoor company. He gets on his mountain bike every Sabbath morning and he just rides up, lives in Altadena, just rides up into the mountains and after he gets a couple miles out in the middle of nowhere, he just stops, got a good sweat, pouring, and he just sits there and just lets God love him. You do it, how you do it. You be how God made you to be. Saint Jerome, 4th century, said, "Fine, this was his advice to kind of ordinary Christians, not monks, not nuns, people like you and I." He said, "Find in the busy city the desert, the Array Mosque of the monks," meaning "fine solitude and silence and stillness right in the middle of your life." Morning drop off, work, email, phone notifications, war with a ron, like find the quiet of God right where you are. This is the invitation of Jesus. What did Jesus say over and over again? Come and follow me. Now the way to translate that is come and follow my way of life. Come and take on my life example and pour your life into the template set by me. Now there's like a spiritual dimension to that right of living in union with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit in the kingdom of God, which is not a metaphor, it's a reality. There's a moral or an ethical dimension of that, living the sermon on the Mount, loving our enemies, blessing those who curse us, praying for those who yell and slander and criticize us, being free of worry, living in the moment, practicing the way of generosity, letting go of materialism, saying faithful to our commitments and our spouses, fighting off lust, so on and so forth. There's this ethical dimension of following Jesus. But then there's this like pragmatic nuts and bolts discipleship aspect where Jesus would get up really early all of the time and he would sneak away and he would just sit out in the woods and listen to God. To follow Jesus, the invitation to follow Jesus is an invitation, not just to come to church and learn good theology. That's great. It's to follow Jesus, to pattern your life after His. So for those of you who want to give this a try, each week will offer you a very simple exercise. There's kind of more in depth ones in the guide, but a very simple exercise to take the idea of the teaching and in Jesus' own language, put it into practice. This week's exercise is very simple. It is just to begin your day with a few minutes of solitude, silence and stillness. I would invite you to do this before you look at your phone or rush out the door to just sit with God. You may find this works better for you again late at night or when your two-year-old is napping or whatever, but for most of us, not all, most, the morning for so many levels is just your body is rested, your mind is fresh. It's just the best time. The day is new and set before you. There's instructions in your guidebook for kind of just recommendations for how you could do this, just finding a quiet place and quiet time and taking some deep breaths and just welcoming the breath, the spirit of God. Letting God love you. Your mind will get distracted. Your mind will run all over the place. You'll be four minutes into prayer and all of a sudden halfway through your weekly grocery list before you wake up and realize, "Oh yes, Jesus, I love you." After great fruits, kombucha and tortillas. That doesn't make you bad at prayer or bad at quiet. It makes you a human being with a brain that goes all over the place. Thomas Keating used to say, "In prayer, if your mind gets distracted a thousand times, it's a thousand chances to come back to God. You just let it go. Come back. Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I love you. I receive your love. I give it back." And then just spend time resting the love of God. Let God's presence fill your body. Let it calm the troubled waters of your heart. Just let God love you. You don't need to make anything happen. You don't need to do anything or think anything or say anything or even pray anything. Just loving attentiveness to God. You may want to read your Bible after this or pray intercession after this or listen to worship music after this lovely, but just spend a little time sitting in the quiet with God. Again, it's a whole bunch more information in that guidebook. There is some for sale out front where you can just order our Amazon or through the church website. There is a free digital version that you can download for free on this site, but I highly recommend you spend 10 bucks to get a physical copy so you can do this stuff without your phone and just bring this with you into the quiet for exercises in the week ahead. Let me end with this from Ruth Hayley Barton who's written a beautiful book called "Invitation to Silence and Solitude." That's the recommended reading for this practice. She writes this, "The invitation to solitude and silence is just that. It is an invitation to enter into more deeply into the intimacy of relationship with the one who waits just outside the noise and busyness of our lives. It is an invitation to communication and communion with the one who is always present even when our awareness has been dulled by distraction. It is an invitation to the adventure of spiritual transformation in the deepest places of our being, an adventure that will result in greater freedom and authenticity and surrender to God than we have yet experienced. I just love our imagery and I want to leave you with it. God. Full of more love than you could possibly imagine. Saint Ignatius called God, capital L, love loving. That's who God is. Love loving. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, relationship at the center of the universe is quietly waiting outside the door of your life. In between you and that God is your phone and the internet and the precedent and the news and the Supreme Court and UFOs and conspiracy theories and work emails and to-do and you got to go to the DMV and Home Depot and got this tax. All of that is swirling that's just life but waiting on the other side of all that noise is love loving waiting to love you heal you save you speak to you quietly at a whisper and bless you. Ultimately the invitation to silence, solitude, stillness is not an invitation to better mental health or Christian mindfulness or emotional well-being. Those are all byproducts or practices and they're good but ultimately it is an invitation into what Christians call union with God to enter into the life the Father and the Son and the Spirit of love loving. Saint John of the latter who translated the desert spirituality of the 4th century to the wider church said the friend of silence comes close to God that was his summary of their spirituality. Do you want to come close to God then befriend the solitude, silence, and stillness and follow Jesus into the quiet. Thanks for listening. This podcast is from practice in the way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. We're crowdfunded nonprofits to everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid full by the circle and other givers. Special thanks today goes to Amy from Boulder, Colorado, Elizabeth from San Carlos, California, Katherine from Durhamham, North Carolina, Marissa from Likoswego, Oregon, Adam from Edmond, Washington. Thank you all very much. To join this friend in the circle or learn more about our resources visit practiceintheway.all. Until next time with a grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.