Solitude and Silence

1. Read 1 Kings 19:1-7. What challenges do you personally face when attempting to practice solitude? How can you overcome these challenges?
2. When have you felt completely depleted like Elijah and struggled to get out of despair even in the solitude with God?
3. True solitude in the Christian sense is not therapeutic relaxation or "me-time," or an emptying of all the senses––it is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter. With that understanding, what does your desert place or wilderness look like with God in this season?
4. Read 1 Kings 19:8-18. Why did God reveal Himself to Elijah in a gentle whisper or thin silence instead of in the powerful wind, earthquake, or fire? What did he want to teach him?
5. What is a question you've been wrestling with in the solitude? How has God transformed you in this place of encounter? How does solitude prepare us to be in community? In what ways do they go together?

Prayer + Practice:

The following are some thoughts to help you in your daily time with God in the quiet place:

1. Find your spot. Set apart a space and time for solitude with God. It might be morning or evening. Designate a certain chair or face the chair away from your desk, light a candle, or play a song that will signal your time with God.
2. Begin with a modest goal. Decide how much time you can set aside and set some sort of alarm so you’re not checking your phone. Turn it on Do Not Disturb. If you’re new to this, maybe try 10 or 15 minutes in the silence and increase from there.
3. Settle into a comfortable, yet alert physical position. Settle in so that it’s comfortable, but you’re not nodding off.
4. Start with a simple prayer that expresses your openness and desire for God. Some prewritten prayers, Psalms, or the Lord’s Prayer are great for getting your heart set in the right direction when you're not quite there yet. Find one that resonates that you can use to express where you want your heart to be. Then when you get distracted, use that prayer to bring you back and refocus.
5. Always end with gratitude for God’s presence. Even if you feel like you didn’t experience anything in particular or “get anything out of it,” thank God that he’s invited you into that space and wants to have a relationship with you. And trust that the more you show up, the more you’ll learn to love that time and experience his presence.
6. Resist the urge to judge yourself or your experience in silence. If you get distracted, don’t be hard on yourself or think it’s not for you. Keep coming back and just know that God is doing a work in you when you show up there, even if just under the surface at first. Trust him to guide you in it.

All right. Well, hey, sometimes, I know in my life, there have been times where my life just looks like a shaken up jar of river water. The sediment is just part of life, right?

That's just a piece of it. But life moves so fast that it just constantly gets shaken up. And there's very little room to let it settle so that you can see clearly. Some of it is just from just the inner chaos, right? What's in our own heart.

Some of it could be physical, it could be a diagnosis or, you know, just exhaustion. Some of it is just other people's chaos.

Some of it is the barrage of distractions and notifications and just the never ending responsibilities. But our lives are always getting shaken up. And I was reading a book on distraction, some of the reasons why we can't focus. One of the studies was showing that when you're interrupted, it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back to the same state of focus that you were in 23 minutes. But it's not primarily a productivity issue.

Even between all the notifications and switching and attempts at multitasking. Right. We very rarely get to a true deep state of focus. But it's not just. It's not just our attention that gets scrambled, our very identity and sense of self, our purpose in life.

Sometimes we're just like a jar of river water that can't sit still long enough to just see clearly. And it's important because in four weeks, we're going to start a series on prayer. August is going to be a month of prayer. God has really been doing a work in our staff and just our church collectively, just calling us into a deeper life of prayer right now. So we're going to start a series in four weeks on prayer.

But if we want to learn how to go deeper with God in prayer, we're going to need a container for it. And it needs some, just the right environment to understand it and to practice it. And that's what solitude is. It's a space to be yourself with God. And so we need to.

We need to know our value in God before we can be who we need to be in the community that he's placed us in the. Otherwise, we'll just be taking from that community, no matter how much we try to serve it. We'll be spending our energy on managing our image and proving our worth and navigating our insecurities.

Stillness in the presence of God is what makes that sediment fall. And so when it comes to spiritual disciplines, solitude and silence on the one hand, and community on the other are two pillars of the christian life. They're two containers that all of the spiritual disciplines fit in. Dallas Willard said that he organized all of the spiritual disciplines into disciplines of abstinence and disciplines of engagement. Okay, so disciplines where you're abstaining from something for a period of time, and disciplines where you're the engaging, there's sort of a retreat and then a return, a breathing in and a breathing out.

You're breathing in the life of God and breathing out in worship and service to the community. So everything in the christian life falls under these two categories. Henry Nouwen. He said, without solitude, it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. He says, we don't take the spiritual life seriously if we don't set aside time to be with God and listen to him.

Until we learn how to sit with God in silence and solitude, we're not taking the spiritual life seriously.

So he says, somewhere, somewhere we know that without a lonely place, our lives are in danger. Somewhere we know that without silence, words lose their meaning. Without listening, speaking no longer heals. Without distance, closeness cannot cure. Somewhere we know that without a lonely place, our actions quickly become empty gestures.

So he says, the careful balance between silence and words, between withdrawal and involvement, distance and closeness, solitude and community forms the basis of the christian life, and therefore should be the subject of our most personal attention. We go into solitude so that we know who we are in Christ. We come out of solitude so that we can be Christ to others.

Problem is, most of us just never go all in on either one. Very many people just don't go all in on either one, on the solitude or community. I love how Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it in his book, Life Together, which is all about the importance of christian community and what that should look like. In a book about community, he says, let him who cannot be alone beware of community.

He says, if you refuse to be alone, you are rejecting Christ's call to you, and you can have no part in the community of those who are called. Because when we're not experiencing the love of God towards us in solitude, we're always trying to get other people to fill our emptiness.

But he says the reverse is also true. He says, let him who is not in community beware of being alone, because without community, solitude just takes the shape of our ego.

We need both. And Jesus. He modeled this rhythm of retreat, this rhythm of retreat and return. Jesus himself frequently withdrew to the wilderness and prayed. So he began his ministry going into the wilderness 40 days, 40 nights, in the wilderness without food.

And Willard, I love reading Willard on this because he says the desert was his fortress. That was his place of strength, was the desert. And it was a normal part of his life to go into the desert, into the wilderness, come back out and perform healing and preach the gospel. Nouwen even says it was the secret to his ministry was this time in the desert. So scripture makes clear that the wilderness or the desert, it has a crucial place in our spiritual lives and our passage today in one kings 19, gives us just a powerful image of this.

This retreat and return in the life of Elijah. And I love it because it shows how solitude and silence, they've got different levels to them. You can go deeper and deeper in them in our lives. And so sort of just like an athlete, where sometimes you may need to get out of the game for a minute just to get a breather and go back. In other times, you may be nursing an injury, and you're.

You have to sit still a little bit longer before going back into the game. So turn, if you've got your bibles, to one, kings 19. Just to give you some context, in chapter 18, right before this is one of the most exciting showdowns in the entire Bible, Elijah is on Mount Carmel with 450 prophets of Baalje, and he challenges them to this showdown and says, whoever's God can bring down fire from heaven on these altars is the true God. So they agree to it. 450 prophets.

They all start hooping and hollering and cutting themselves and just going into a frenzy, trying to get Baal to bring fire down onto this altar with this ox. And they go until evening, and it just. Nothing ever happens. It says, there was no voice. No one answered, no one paid attention.

Elijah decides to tell them, hey, fill it up with water. Just pour water all over this altar, so much so that it fills up the trenches around it, makes sort of a moat around it. And then he prays to God that fire would come down from heaven and burn it up. And if you know the story, not only the ox and the wood gets burnt up, but it's so hot, it burns up the dust and the stones and licks up the water in the trench around it. It's a big victory for Yahweh.

They all fall on their faces and say, yahweh is God. And then they put to death these prophets of Baal. This is all just a huge showing in the chapter before where we'll be of just God's power. But when King Ahab tells Jezebel she goes into a rage. When he told Jezebel all that Elijah had done and how he killed the prophets with the sword.

Jezebel sent a message, a messenger to Elijah saying, so may the gods do to me, and even more if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time. And he was afraid and arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah. He left his servant there, it says, but he himself, when it went a day's journey into the wilderness, came down, sat down under a juniper tree, and he requested for himself that he might die. I said, it is enough now, O Lord, take my life, for I am not better than any of my fathers. He goes into this wilderness after this huge showing, into this lonely desert because the crown can't follow him there.

The crown really has no authority there in the desert, but it also carries an inherent risk because there's no sustenance there. So he goes into this desert. And, you know, the desert fathers, during the monastic movement, they said that the desert, the wilderness, this dry and lonely place is supremely valuable to God precisely because it has no value to humans, because there's nothing to attract you to the desert and there's nothing you can exploit there. It's just you and God. So Elijah, he was familiar with these rhythms, retreat and return.

Even before the showdown on Mount Carmel in chapter 17, he's gone into the wilderness again, and he's being supernaturally fed. God is sending meat with these ravens and supernaturally feeding him. But this desert, the wilderness, bookends this huge showing on Mount Carmel. And in both places, you see God just supernaturally providing for him there, giving him rest, giving him nourishment. But Elijah is so deep in his despair and depression that this particular day in the wilderness isn't cutting it for him.

Elijah, he's physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually just depleted from this showdown. Isn't it comforting, though? Isn't it kind of comforting to know that even just this great man of God, this great prophet in the Bible got to this low of a point?

So he lays down, he sleeps under this juniper tree, and behold, there was an angel touching him. And he said to him, arise, eat. Then he looked, and behold, and there was at his head a bread cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. So he ate and he drank and he lay down, and the angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, arise, eat, because the journey is too great for you. There's two times here that we see Elijah going to sleep and waking up to eat, being supernaturally fed by goddesse.

So here in the wilderness, Elijah is getting rest and he's getting nourishment from God.

The psalms tell us God gives to his beloved sleep. And so I love the fact that sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is just go to bed. Right? Just go to bed. Just go to sleep.

But there's a repetition of not only sleep, but also eating. Here, God's also calling us to arise and eat because the journey is too great for us. The beginning of the gospel of Mark shows Jesus between all this activity, arising early, going out into the lonely place and praying. And here this angel is telling Elijah, arise, eat, for the journey is too great for you. And I just want to point out that if the journey is too great for Elijah, this great prophet of the Bible, and if Jesus never operated without this lonely desert place in his life, how, how do we start to think that we're too busy, that we can't fit it in, that there's not enough time in the day?

We need the time in the wilderness, in the desert to be nourished by God, to rest in him. Scripture says that literally we can do nothing apart from him.

I think one of our problems is that we don't quite believe that, that apart from him we can do nothing. And so we start relying on our own self sufficiency. But we also, I think part of the problem, too, is that we just don't know what to expect. It hasn't really been modeled for a lot of us. What does that time in the solitude look like?

What should I expect from it? You know, what does it mean for us to enter into that wilderness or desert place? Ruth, Haley Barton has a book that I would recommend to you is very good, just called an invitation to solitude and silence. And it's an excellent book, very practical, just very practical on what, what you see there in the silence and solitude, what that place looks like. And here's really just some thoughts for you on just this regular daily rhythm in your life.

First is just find your desert, find your wilderness, find your spot, the space and time for that solitude with God. This will look different for different seasons of life. Maybe the morning is the best time for you because it's before everybody else gets up and you can start your day this way. But for some of you, maybe nighttime would be the best. Before going to bed, you might have a certain chair that you just designate for that time with God.

You know, when you're sitting in that chair, you're with him. Or if you don't have a chair you can set aside, maybe you have some kind of routine that just gets it in your head. You're architecting your space and just saying, okay, when I light this candle, when maybe there's a certain song you listen to, or you turn the chair in a different direction, away from the desk, just a signal in your mind that this is a special place.

I think that idea of architecting your space is really helpful. I still do it sometimes. Where I started years ago, where, when I wanted to study, I would turn on the inception soundtrack, and it's so good for studying, maybe not for you. I love it for studying and whatever it did in my mind, because I did it every time that I studied, as soon as I heard the beginning of the track, my mind was in go mode. I had the inception soundtrack in my ears, and I had my coffee, and I was ready.

I would go into a place of study a lot faster. Maybe it's. Maybe you have some kind of worship song, like the last song that we sang. I just want to be in the room with you, something that gets your heart there, that just cues you in. Sometimes I'll have.

I have one or two songs that'll do that for me, where I'll just sometimes listen to it. It just gets me there a little faster.

There may be seasons where your kids are young. Maybe they're colicky. Maybe, you know, you're just having a hard time getting them to rest. Maybe you get them in the car, and you just go and you drive with the music off. Just spend that time, preferably when there's no traffic.

Just spend that time just talking to God. Be creative. Find that space. Find that time. Find your desert.

But set aside time and place. That can be your daily desert practice. I'd say, too, just begin with a modest goal. Okay, if this is not something you're used to, start with something modest. Maybe ten minutes, maybe 15 minutes.

But start with something that, you know, you can sit in, and then you can increase it from there.

I'd say settle into just, like, a comfortable physical position, but one that's alert, right? You don't want to just go to sleep when you get there, right? There's Elijah sleeping and resting. But, you know, if you got ten minutes, you don't want to use it for nap time. Okay, if you've got ten minutes, just.

If it's a straight back chair, just get in a position. Maybe trying some different prayer positions, like kneeling something that will get your mind there, but that's alert to God, because the whole point of this is that you're just trying to orient your whole self to him so you can just settle in comfortably in an alert position. Start with, you know, just a simple prayer that gets your mind and heart ready. You know, some pre written prayers or the psalms or the Lord's prayer is so good. I tell you, for me, whenever I'm getting up and I'm just not there yet.

I'm just not in that place yet. Sometimes praying one of those prayers, something that expresses your desire to be with God, expresses the desire that you want to have in that moment to orient your mind there. So sometimes just starting with a psalm or the Lord's prayer always end with gratitude for God and his presence. I would caution you to not go through the time and then just say, I didn't get anything out of it. Because even if you feel like you didn't get something out of it, God is.

Thank God for the invitation to meet him there. And just know that as you show up, he's doing a work in you. It may be under the surface at first, but the more that you show up to that place, to the desert place, the more you're going to grow to love that time and then resist the urge to judge yourself or your experience in the silence if you get distracted, because our brains go all over the place, if you get distracted, fight the urge to judge yourself and just, you know, feel guilty for it. Use. Use one of those prayers.

Just come back. Just come back. It's an invitation back into his presence. Just trust him to guide you in it. Those are just a few ideas.

This rhythm of retreat and return, it needs to be a normal part of our daily lives, just where we sit in the stillness long enough for that sediment to settle and we get clarity in his presence. But in this instance, in Elijah's life, he just needed a little bit more. This time, this particular time, he was so deep in despair and depression.

His life was so shaken up. He just knew he needed to get deeper.

So he arose and ate and drank and went in the strength of that food 40 days and 40 nights to horeb the mountain of God.

Sometimes life is just too much, and the normal daily routine just isn't going to cut it. There's times that you need more time to carve out just for everything in your life to sort of settle. And for Elijah, he's been fed, he's been strengthened, but his despair is not overcome yet.

But he knows exactly where to go. He's got to get to Mount Horeb. This is the exact same mountain. This is Mount Sinai. This is another word.

There's another name for Mount Sinai. Okay? It's the same mountain that Moses was on, the same one where this all began, this mountain, this great place of confrontation with God in his presence. So what's interesting here, though, is that there's this parallel that the author sets up in one kings. There's this parallel he sets up with Moses, with the life of Moses.

You know, it wouldn't have taken Elijah but maybe ten to twelve days to actually get to horeb from where he was. But he goes in the strength of that food. He goes for 40 days and 40 nights, mirroring the time in Exodus when Moses was on the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights. You see a lot of the same elements of just this grand, they call it a theophany, this grand showing of God's presence and power. With the earthquake and with the fire and with the, just the rumbling and the great wind, you see this parallel with moses.

Jesus would also later spend 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness to go and launch his ministry as well. So Elijah, he comes to this great mountain of confrontation, and then he came there to a cave and lodged there. And behold, the word of the Lord came to him and said to him, what are you doing here, Elijah? What are you doing here, Elijah?

The same question and response gets repeated twice here. For emphasis. God calls him by name in this space.

He calls him by name. He asks them this deliberate question, what are you doing here, Elijah? God already knows the answer. But the questions that, the questions that we wrestle with in the solitude, in the silence, they reveal something about us. They force us to face the truth about ourselves and about our situation.

These questions that we wrestle with, have you ever felt that question in the solitude? What am I doing here?

Who am I when I'm not producing anything?

Won't the world just pass me by as I sit here doing nothing? The questions that we wrestle with in solitude go to the very core of our identity. So here's Elijah's answer. He said, I've been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the sons of Israel, have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, killed your prophets with the sword, and I alone am left, and they seek my life to take it. Elijah's response to God's question reveals something about him that I don't think normally gets brought out in this passage.

First, his statement about being zealous is so true. It's very true. He even uses just a grammatical form in the Hebrew that intensifies an already intense word. He has been singularly, passionately focused on God and his glory.

But second, you notice these parallels with Moses. When Moses was on the same mountain and the people had turned away and made this golden calf and then said, this is the God who brought us out of Egypt. And God said to Moses, he said, stand aside because I'm going to wipe them away. And Moses could have had everything in this moment. He would have been the guy.

He would have been the guy, the father, the new father of the nation. God was going to restart with him. And yet what does he do? He stands in that place and he intercedes for these people, and he appeals to God's honor and said, what are the nations going to think? And he stands in the gap for these people.

But in contrast, very understandably, Elijah is talking up their idolatry and he complains that he alone is left. Now, these are totally legitimate complaints, okay? But something about this just really bothered me as I was studying this week, because he wasn't alone and he actually knew it. In chapter 18, right before the showdown at Mount Carmel, he meets the prophet Obadiah, and they have a little exchange. Obadiah says to him, has it not been told to my master what I did when Jezebel killed the prophets of the Lord?

That I hid 100 prophets of the Lord by fifties in a cave and provided them with bread and water? Obadiah was doing basically what Corey Tenboom's family did in the Holocaust when they were hiding the Jews.

Where Elijah's ministry is this big, outward, flashy, incredible thing. Obadiah is over here protecting so many of the Lord's prophets in a very quiet way that not everybody sees, but they had the conversation. Elijah knows he's not alone.

And so part of what Elijah is having to deal with in this silence and solitude is just something we all have to deal with. His self importance has blinded him to a certain degree. He's a great prophet. God is using him mightily. But God's got to work on his ego a bit, just like he does with all of us.

We saw a glimpse of it when he was depressed under the juniper tree. He asked to die because he was no greater than his fathers. It's a totally relatable place to be completely. But even in that self deprecation, he has a preoccupation in that moment with the self. And when we get to the quiet place.

God starts chipping away at the rough edges that we don't want to face. So that's part of the reason we avoid it. But the place of struggle is a place of encounter. The place where we struggle with these questions is the place where we meet, encounter God's presence. So he's about to encounter God in a way that only Moses has experienced.

God tells him, go forth, stand on the mountain before the Lord. And behold, the Lord was passing by, and a great and strong wind was rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks before the Lord. This landslide, avalanche. But the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind, an earthquake.

But the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, a fire. But the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, the sound of a gentle blowing. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave.

And behold, a voice came to him and said again, what are you doing here, Elijah? What are you doing here? So remember in Exodus, Moses is on this same mountain. Asked Goddesse, he asks God to show him his glory. So God, he hides Moses in the cleft of the rock.

Some people think it may even be this same cave. They're on the same mountain.

He hides them in the cleft of the rock as God was passing by. But for all the terror, the terrible sights that shook the mountain as a sign of God's presence with Moses here, God isn't showing those flashy signs. It says God wasn't in them.

He's in the gentle blowing. Some translations say soft whisper or something similar to that. The Hebrew really is just, it says the sound of a thin silence. So it's hard to interpret exactly what that is.

But the contrast, the contrast with Moses experience, I think, is key here. God is showing Elijah, hey, you want all of this great activity, you want all of this great activity to be your whole spiritual life? I need you to know who you are in the silence with me. When you're not producing anything, when you're not getting affirmation, who are you in that moment when you have no distractions telling you what you should care about, what you should love or desire or be outraged about, what do you love in that moment? Who do you love?

Do you know that you're loved? What are you doing here, Elijah?

And it's interesting to me that he gives the same answer. I've been very zealous for the Lord. He says, the God of hosts, for the sons of Israel, have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars and killed your prophets with the sword. And I alone am left, and they seek my life to take it away. I wrestled with that this week because, you know, both the question and response, they're repeated again, just for emphasis.

But I wanted to see just in myself, I wanted to see a change when I read that. I wanted him to recognize in that moment, in that response, that he's not alone. But I think it goes to show how deep these realities set within us, these illusions of the false self. Thomas Merton, he talks about the desert, about solitude, and he says that there is no greater disaster, no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality.

I think sometimes we've been feeding on unreality so long that it just takes longer. It just takes longer in the wilderness, in God's presence, to work it out. But that's another good question to ask God in the solitude, where have I been feeding on unreality?

I have a whole list I would love to give you right now, but I think that is something to work out with God. Where have I been feeding on unreality?

God's response is interesting, too, though, because even though Elijah's answer is the same, he gets this response from God that directly confronts his self importance and the idea that he's alone. God tells him to go anoint these specific kings. He tells him about Elisha and that Elisha is going to be his successor. And as if to say, as if God is saying, I'll show you. You're not the central character in the story, he adds this, I will leave 7000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal and every mouth that has not kissed him.

Elijah discovers in the solitude that he is not alone. Paradoxically, he discovers there in the solitude that he's not alone. Between Obadiah and Elisha and this 7000 person remnant that God has left that are steadfast in persecution, in this retreat from the community into the wilderness, Elijah discovers he's not the center of the story, not the center of the universe. That's what we discover in God's presence. I'm not the center of this story.

I'm not the center of this universe verse. Elijah discovers who he is in relation to who God is, and then he's propelled back into the community in a fresh way to be who he's supposed to be for that community.

And this is, I think, a big reason why leaders fall.

It's too easy to get caught up in your own press, read your own headlines, feel like you have a special anointing that somehow sets you apart from other people.

And then you start to neglect that wilderness in your life. Every time, every single time that a leader falls, it is because they have neglected the desert place with God.

Theyve neglected their own private lives just because of the apparent success of their public lives. And its so easy for all of us to do. Remember Bonhoeffer's words from earlier, let him who cannot be alone, beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.

I think part of the reason that we don't engage deeply in just solitude is because it hasn't been modeled for a lot of us. So we don't know one, what it looks like, how to enter it, what to do when we get there. And the world has distorted, it's distorted what this idea of solitude is into a therapeutic place of me, time and relaxation. It's a distorted view, a place where we escape into entertainment and continue feeding on unreality. Have you ever met a person who got up from the couch after an hour of TikTok and said, that is why I'm alive.

You can't find clarity and purpose and identity there, even if you're by yourself. Entertainment is not stillness. So in this distorted view of solitude as me time, we avoid the presence of God that will really transform our lives and continue just feeding on unreality. Henry Nouwen says this solitude is the place of great struggle and the great encounter. It's the place of the great struggle and the great encounter.

He calls it the furnace of transformation, and says, without solitude, we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self. And that's why, that's part of why we're so afraid of real solitude, what we'll find there when we're alone with God and ourselves, all the things that we try to manage and hide in the normal parts of life, those are the things that we deal with there. So no one says solitude is not a private, therapeutic place. Rather, it's the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born. The place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs.

He says, it's where I get rid of my scaffolding. No friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract. Just me, naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken. Nothing. He says it's the place of the great struggle and the place of the great encounter.

I actually tried to do a little experiment this week so you didn't have to. I took one of the world's distorted views of solitude and silence to the extreme, just to see what would happen. Just as an experiment. Try it out. Something called a deprivation tank.

You heard of these? So basically, you have this tank that you go into. It's shallow, filled with water, about 1100 pounds of some kind of salt mixture. Just so you float right on top, and you get in and see this isn't going to the next picture. You get in and there's a light in there that you turn off.

Close that door, and it's completely soundproof. You can't hear anything. There is absolutely no light. You can't tell a difference between your eyes open or closed. The water is skin temperature, so if you're still.

You can't even really feel it. You're just floating for 90 minutes and nothing.

Some of you would love this. Some of you would hate this experience. It was so weird.

Felt good on my back, my bad back. But, you know, solitude is not about emptying yourself to some extreme and depriving you of your senses. I prefer solitude with my senses. I went on a three day prayer retreat recently to South Texas and just did a little reading, a little praying, just sitting with God in the silence. I was in a field.

Sun was going down. I had just been out there for hours. Sun was going down. And, man, it just looked like the whole family field was on fire with God's presence. It was just beautiful watching the sun just light up this whole place, an experience that I, after three days, just can't really describe what it was like, but it's something I'm trying to incorporate more of in my life.

Not this therapeutic idea, but that transforming place with God.

Ruth Healy Barton says solitude, at its most basic and profound level, is simply an opportunity to be ourselves with God.

It's an invitation to be in his presence with no other distractions, an opportunity to know experientially that you are loved by him. Place to be radically transformed. So that's the challenge today. We've got four weeks until this prayer series. Challenge today is find your place, find your spot, find that desert, that wilderness in your life, if you already have it, if this is something you've been practicing, see where God wants you to go a little bit deeper.

Maybe when you're practicing Sabbath, you take a little bit more time. Maybe you have to plan accordingly with the people in your life and get creative for how you can find this solitude for each other, to make it. Make it accessible. But I mean, you see, even just this jar, just the time that we've been sitting here, the sediment has started to settle a little bit. I actually came in the office today.

I did this on Friday just to look and put it together. And I came in this morning and it was so clear I could see the rocks in the bottom because it had had extra time to just settle.

So find your spot, find your desert, get to the mountainous our channel.