Struggling to Hear God? Try Cultivating Quiet to Connect with Him

If you want to hear God, the best place to begin is making time and space that’s quiet and distraction-free.

We are called to be a listening people. How can we be otherwise? In the beginning, there was one radiant Word so beautiful it shattered the ancient and unformed darkness. This Word of God named and narrated us alive, spoke our battered, beautiful cosmos into being, and when it began it was wholly good.

We Were Made to Listen

In the beginning, we listened, and our listening was life itself. Adam and Eve, unlimited by fear, unencumbered by pain, were offered the total freedom of an unblemished creation. And every day God called them. God came every day to talk with his people and called them by name, and this was before the fall. What would they have talked about? Was every conversation the ground of new discovery for Adam and Eve, the invitation into a greater exploration of their image-bearing personhood?  

That daily conversation must have been the place in which they began to discover the innate capability of their own being and the comprehensive goodness in which it was cradled. God’s voice was the native soil of his people. And quiet was their homeland because in listening they entered afresh into the world-making words of God. But that wondering, fertile hush was replaced with a voice that not only displaced the quiet but unraveled their capacity to listen.

What Did We Gain?

What did she gain? The more I read back through the story, the more I am convinced that all the serpent could promise was a knowledge of evil. He told them it was the knowledge of good and evil, but Adam and Eve, image-bearers of God, created from the overflow of God’s generous love, walking amidst divine imagination enfleshed in the earth—they already knew all goodness. All they could gain was the knowledge of evil, the wary, grasping knowledge of all that opposes the goodness of God.

What does it feel like to bear the knowledge of evil? I sometimes wonder if it just means an unendingly disquiet mind. Ever since that day, the human race has spent much of its history using noise to obscure the discord of that choice. So that we may forget how frail and terrified we have become. But in an age of media technology, we have raised this awful skill to a way of life. I am appalled sometimes to realize how much my own use of media technology is an unexamined effort to escape whatever makes me afraid. I use my screens to distract myself from my insecurity, my sense of inadequacy, my loneliness and hunger.

The Word (Jesus) Is Still Speaking

How many times in the last years of pandemic and sickness, of profound loneliness and loss, have I sat down for my first quiet moment and found myself so raw in the presence of quiet that I took up my phone as if it were a shield? Something to keep me from looking full-on at the emptiness I feel? Humanity has never run short of ways to distract itself, but in the media age, distraction has become a way of life. I wonder if it’s because our fear has become too great to face.

At the heart of our devastated silence is still that great Word speaking us back into life. He has never ceased to hover over the dark and unformed waters of our beings, speaking our names, his calling always an invitation to redemption.

But we have to listen. We are invited to listen; quiet is never something that begins with us. It is always a response to the loving words of our Creator. That great Word spoke to us again when he took flesh, entered the cacophony of a fallen world, and, with his own final words—“It is finished”— began the story of love again.

We enter quiet not just to hush our own voices but to hear his. And in the hearing, be saved.

In His Word

Read John 10: 22-30. Notice what Jesus says about listening to His voice in verse 27. It truly reinforces how important it is to be listening to His voice consistently.

In Your Life

• How do you make space for quiet moments in your life to listen God and spend time in His Word?
• How can you embrace a practice of quiet in everyday moments to make space for God to appear?

We Recommend

We recommend the book Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention by Sarah Clarkson. Clarkson invites us to cultivate quiet in our lives so we can revitalize our spiritual life, resist the cultural obsession with distraction, and stay grounded in our present. Her award-winning, lyrical writing gently nudges us to halt our busyness and find moments of stillness so we can lean in to God.

Let’s Connect

Sarah Clarkson is an author and blogger who writes regularly about literature, faith, and beauty at SarahClarkson.com. She studied theology (BTh, MSt) at Oxford and is the author or coauthor of six books, including This Beautiful Truth. She has an active following on Instagram called Sarah Wonders where she hosts regular live read-alouds from the poems, novels, or essays that bring her courage. Often she can be found with a cup of good tea and a book in hand in her old English vicarage home in Oxford, where she lives with her Anglican vicar husband, Thomas, and their four children.