"Shhhhhhh!"

Job 33:31 "Pay attention, O Job, listen to me; be silent and I will speak." (ESV)

I don't like to be silent, I don't like to sit in silence, and I sure as heck don't have the patience to do either for long periods of time. My A.D.D. tendencies get in the way, and I can't focus when things are quiet. This is probably why I never studied well in the library! However, God calls us to be silent sometimes, He doesn't just ask politely. Over and over in the Bible are stories of people who heard God.... in moments of SILENCE!! Hmm, okay God, I think I'm on to something here. :)

"The man gazed at her in SILENCE to learn whether the LORD had prospered his journey or not." Genesis 24:21

"A form was before my eyes; there was SILENCE, then I heard a voice..." Job 4:16

"When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was SILENCE in heaven for about half an hour." Revelations 8:1

God teaches people things in silence, He reveals Himself in silence, and by asking us to have moments of silence, I feel He's really asking us to slow down and spend time with Him! When we sit in silence, we have to face reality. We face the reality that we are a broken, beat down, ragamuffin of a person who struggles to keep our head above water in this fallen world. To understand God's love for us and to allow Him to heal us, we must understand that without Him we are absolutely nothing, we are totally broken, and to put it "lightly", we're a mess. So we're required to sit in silence, to face the impostor. (**See note at bottom) When we face our impostor, we're able to call it out when things go wrong, getting to a point where we don't let sin define who we are. Being able to call the impostor out and come to a point of brokenness, allows God to swoop in and heal our battle scars and fill us with His goodness. Brennan Manning quotes Sister Barbara Fiand in his book "Abba's Child": "Wholeness is brokenness owned and thereby healed." God can't heal us if the impostor is in the way, and pointing our the impostor requires acknowledgment of our brokenness!

xoxo, VA

**IMPOSTOR: the person that Satan wants us to believe we are. The impostor IS the person we are without the Holy Spirit living in us and without God's love. The impostor is selfish, lustful, prideful, rebellious, drunk, self conscious, money hungry, self doubting, worthless, useless, good for nothing, uncompassionate, unforgiving, regretful, lonely, lost, helpless, etc. These are words that I use to describe my impostor. Luckily, this person isn't who I really am, who I REALLY am is a child of the Father, a princess of the King, and a bride of Jesus Christ.