The forest cocooned me in stillness, yet I could still hear the echo of the life I left behind. The sharp bounce of questions off cinder block walls, the scrape of chairs across linoleum, the crank of a thirty-year-old pencil sharpener clinging to its crooked mount. Each sound carried its own expectation.
Instructing.
Monitoring.
Supporting.
Holding the day together while meeting a thousand small demands.
No moment in the classroom was ever truly quiet. Even when the students were gone, to-do lists and deadlines clamored for attention, a constant ticking inside my mind. The noise wasn’t just loud, it was relentless.
Summers brought only the softest reprieve, threaded with professional development, new curriculum, team meetings, and the steady anticipation of another group of unknown students. Even rest came dressed as preparation.
And when I did try to carve out stillness – to listen, to breathe, to hear something holy – it was hard to catch God’s voice beneath the tumult, internal and external. Listening felt squeezed into the margins of my life, a whisper competing with the world’s ceaseless clatter.
I finally retired and left Oklahoma’s constant hum behind, trading its heavy heat for the cool breath of the Colorado mountains. I knew I was moving toward quiet – toward the peace I’d longed for.
Still, the first time I walked beneath the pines, into air that held its own calm instead of hurrying me along, the contrast took my breath away.
After years of relentless noise, the stillness wrapped itself around me like something sacred, something I didn’t realize would feel so much like coming home. The stillness wasn’t silence, it was mercy.
As I lingered there, the quiet began to take shape – not as an absence, but as a gentle chorus.
Pine needles brushed softly against one another like a whispered greeting.
Aspen leaves trembled with their delicate, quaking song.
Breezes drifted through the trees with a patient sigh, unhurried and unbothered.
A bird called out now and then, not to fill the silence, but to bless it.
And beneath it all, the steady melodic slip of a stream over rocks stitched the whole forest together.
These sounds didn’t break the silence, they deepened it, drawing me further into a kind of peace I had only imagined. In their company, I felt my soul unclench, as if the mountains themselves were teaching me how to listen again.
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In that stillness, I learned God had been speaking all along. I simply never cultivated the stillness to hear him.
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For years I lived by accomplishment – measuring my worth by what I managed, solved, or held together. I tried to soothe my own anxiety with productivity, believing that if I ever loosened my grip, everything around me would unravel.
But in the hush of the mountains, I saw how tightly I’d clung to fear, and how gently God had been calling me toward rest. His voice hadn’t been absent – I was too hurried, too burdened, too determined to carry everything myself to notice the grace that had been waiting for me all along.
In the stillness of the forest, I understood that God had not been waiting for the noise to stop – He had been waiting for me to stop.
To stop striving.
To stop assuming I had to hold every piece in place.
To stop mistaking constant motion for faithfulness.
The mountains showed me what I had forgotten, that God speaks in steady, gentle ways. That his presence is not found in urgency, but in rest. As I walked beneath the pines, I felt a new rhythm settling over me – unhurried, attentive, rooted. A rhythm that invited me to breathe deeply, to trust fully, and to listen for the quiet voice I had been missing. In that sacred hush, I began to hear him again.
I heard him in the whisper of feathers riding the breeze, in the patient flow of water over stone, in the soft brush of pine boughs swaying above me.
In the quiet of the forest, a matching quiet began to take root in my soul. The trees taught me to breathe again – slowly, fully – to simply live and be. In that stillness, my prayers softened, my creativity widened, and the stories I feel called to tell found a deeper, steadier pulse. Quiet became not the absence of life, but the place where life began to deepen.
I look back wistfully now and wonder, what if I had made space in the chaos to hear God’s voice? What if I had understood that stillness can be as small as a moment, a breath, a quiet corner of the room? I didn’t need to create silence, I only needed to pause.
Here in the hush of the forest, pausing comes naturally. But even if you’re far from mountains and pines, I invite you to find your own quiet space. You don’t need whispering branches or a stream at your feet. You only need a single pause in the busyness of your day, a breath long enough to remember that God is near.
And as you pause, may the same stillness that found me beneath the pines find you as well – quietly, gently – like God’s hand reaching through the hush to steady your heart. May you carry that quiet into the rest of your day, a soft reminder that God is never far and his voice is always nearer than you think.
God of stillness, draw us into the quiet we ache for. Teach us to linger in the stillness between breaths, attentive and open to hear your voice. Hold us in our longing, and help us trust that even here – especially here – you are near. We rest in your presence.
If you’re finding it hard to pause in this season, I’ve created a one-page guide with gentle prompts for slowing down. It’s offered freely, as a quiet companion.
Download A Gentle Guide to Pausing Here
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