The Quiet

This is the week before Christmas, the fun, frenetic one.  The week of Christmas parties and last-minute shopping, of lists scribbled on scraps of paper and calendars packed just a little too full.

For us, it’s also a week of packing and preparation. Not for a frantic dash through theme parks this time, but for something quieter. Slower. We’re heading to Florida again, but instead of rope drops and reservations, there will be sand and water and rest.

This will be another Christmas that doesn’t look like the traditional Midwest holiday I grew up on. No gray skies. No bitter cold. No familiar routines. Instead, the four of us, my kids, now in their twenties, along with my mother, will board a plane and spend Christmas on the beach.

And while that feels exciting, and I am grateful to be able to do it, it also stirs something deeper.  Holidays are strange that way. They can be wonderful, and they can be incredibly hard.

Gone are the days of a “normal” family Christmas for us. In the first couple of years after my separation, my ex and I tried to keep things the same. We attempted the old rhythms, the familiar traditions. But the truth is, it slowly fell away. What once felt natural began to feel forced, and eventually, it simply stopped.

I had no idea how painful holidays could be until then.  I don’t know which is worse, spending holidays alone, or pretending they’re the same when everything has changed. Those early years after divorce ripped my heart open. Nothing screamed failure quite like a Christmas full of grief. The lights felt louder. The joy felt further away. Every song, every tradition seemed to underline what was lost.

If you’re in that place right now, I want you to know this: you are not weak for feeling it. And you are not alone.

Today, my life looks very different. I’ve embraced being single, not as something I’m enduring, but as something I genuinely love. I know that’s not everyone’s path, but for me, it has become a gift. I’m no longer waiting for my life to begin again someday, when something changes. My life is rich right now, exactly as it is.

But it took time to get here.  Those first few years were brutal. And yet, in a strange way, they clarified something for me. I never needed Jesus more than I did at Christmas back then, and He showed up. Every single time. In the quiet. In the ache. In the moments when joy felt out of reach.  I remembered what Christmas really means. 

Even now, I still feel a twinge of sadness during the holidays. Some memories linger. Some losses still ache. But I’m in a different place. A steadier one. A hopeful one.

This year, I’m actually looking forward to Christmas again, looking forward to watching my kids laugh, to sharing it with my mother, to experiencing the season in a way that’s new and unexpected and peaceful.

Family doesn’t always look the way we imagined it would.  But God really does set the lonely in families, sometimes in ways we never saw coming.  And this Christmas, I’m grateful for the reminder and the opportunity to listen for God amongst the quiet.

Elijah and The Voice (imagined by me)

Elijah was running for his life, not from an army or a battlefield, but from a message. From a very angry woman. Jezebel’s words had reached him like a blade carried on the wind, cold, precise, final. She had sworn that by this time tomorrow, Elijah would be dead. The prophet who had just stood on Mount Carmel, watching fire fall from heaven at his prayer, now found himself undone by a threat delivered quietly, efficiently, through a messenger’s mouth.

Fear has a way of doing that. It settles into the body before the mind has time to argue with it. Elijah’s heart raced. His breathing shortened. The certainty he had felt only hours earlier dissolved as the urgency of survival took over. He ran south, farther than he had planned, farther than he had intended, until even familiar ground gave way to wilderness and stone. By the time he reached Horeb, the mountain of God, he was spent, emptied not only of strength, but of hope.

There, he found a cave and retreated into it. The stone was cool beneath his hands, the air inside thick with the scent of dust and earth. The darkness pressed in, muffling sound and swallowing light. Even his breathing felt too loud, each exhale echoing back at him. He wasn’t resting. He was hiding, hiding from Jezebel, from danger, from the crushing weight of fear that had followed him all this way.

It was there, in that cave, that the word of the Lord came to him. It did not arrive with spectacle or force. It came as a presence, steady, near, unmistakable. A voice that did not bounce off the cave walls, but met him exactly where he was, as if it had been waiting.

“What are you doing here, Elijah?”

The question did not accuse. It did not hurry him toward an answer. It simply opened space for truth. Elijah responded from the place where fear had narrowed his vision and exhaustion had rewritten the story he was telling himself. And he spoke the words as they rose from his heart:

“I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.”

He believed it, even though it wasn’t true.  He wasn't the only one left. Fear had convinced him that he was alone, that the story was over, that faithfulness had led only to danger.

The Lord did not rebuke him for being afraid. He did not correct Elijah’s distorted view or remind him of what he had forgotten. Instead, the Lord invited him to step outside. He told Elijah to stand on the mountain, because He was about to pass by.

Elijah moved toward the mouth of the cave, and the air around him shifted, charged with something unsettled and expectant. Suddenly, a great wind tore through the mountain with violent force, ripping across the stone and splitting rocks apart. The sound was overwhelming, a roar that filled the valleys and rattled his bones. Dust and debris stung his skin and burned his eyes.

But the Lord was not in the wind.

Then the ground beneath him began to shake. The mountain groaned and lurched, as if it were breaking apart from the inside. Elijah braced himself, heart pounding, every muscle tense as the earth cracked and shifted beneath his feet.

But the Lord was not in the earthquake.

And after the earthquake came fire, fierce and consuming. Heat rolled across the mountainside, the sky glowing as flames swept through with terrifying intensity. Everything felt exposed, vulnerable, laid bare.

But the Lord was not in the fire.

And then, after all of it, there was quiet. The wind stilled. The ground settled. The fire faded into memory. The mountain itself seemed to exhale.  And in that stillness came a sound so gentle it could barely be called a sound at all, a whisper.

Elijah pulled his cloak over his face, not in fear, but in reverence. In the calm that followed the storm, the presence of the Lord settled in, unmistakable and near. Sometimes the whisper of the Lord is louder because everything else has finally gone silent. Because after the storm has raged, after fear has spent itself, after the earth has stopped shaking, we are ready.

We hear what we could not hear before. We notice the quiet and we cherish it.  The storms do not mean God was absent. Sometimes they prepare us to recognize Him when He speaks.

God did not explain the storms to Elijah. He did not justify the fear or answer every question that had driven him into the cave. Instead, He gave Elijah something far more practical, his next steps. A road to walk. People to anoint. A future still unfolding, even when Elijah could not yet see how it would all fit together.

And Elijah would go on. He would walk again, speak again, and pour his life into another prophet who would carry the work forward. His story did not end in the cave, it widened. It deepened. It continued. The God who met him in the whisper did not replace him; He restored him. The quiet place Elijah feared became the place where his strength returned, and the calling he thought he had lost was gently handed back to him.

The Still Small Voice

The story of Elijah has always fascinated me. The wind that tore through the mountain, the earthquake that shook the ground beneath his feet, the fire that consumed everything in its path, those moments must have been absolutely terrifying. And yet, as frightening as those forces were, I sometimes wonder if the most unsettling moment came afterward. After everything stopped. After the noise died down. When Elijah stood in the absolute stillness and heard a voice speak to him.

There is something deeply vulnerable about quiet.

You know, I love Christmas parties. Some of my favorite memories are wrapped up in noise and laughter and family. We are a family of card players, and I absolutely loved visiting my grandparents, sitting around the card table for hours on end. My grandmother cooking in the kitchen, the smell of food drifting through the house, presents tucked under the tree, cousins barely able to contain their excitement. Those moments mattered. Family matters. Celebration matters. I believe those things matter to God too.

But for a long time, I missed the deeper reverence of the season itself.

The true miracle of Christmas wasn’t loud or elaborate. It wasn’t announced with spectacle or fanfare. It was quiet. A birth in Bethlehem. God giving His Son, fully aware of what that gift would ultimately cost Him, and giving Him anyway. Before Christmas traditions existed, before it became an event or a season or a schedule to keep up with, God chose the stillness. A holy, holy moment.

And I think that’s where I find Him most often too.

I know God is always with me. But it is in the quiet, when things settle, when the noise fades, when I finally stop running, that I hear Him most clearly. Those quiet moments with God are the ones that strengthen me. They realign me. They steady my heart and gently set me back on the path I was meant to walk. Just like Elijah, nothing around me may change, but I do.

I am deeply grateful for a life that allows me to do things I once couldn’t have imagined, including spending Christmas in Florida this year. And no, you don’t have to travel anywhere special to find a quiet moment with God. But I can’t wait to sit by the ocean, to listen to the waves, to ask Him a few questions. To talk about the year that’s been and the year ahead. To think about my next steps and the path He has for me going forward.

I can’t imagine a better Christmas than that.