Quiet
Welcome back to the Solidarity podcast
where we share stories to connect with one another, find comfort in life’s challenges & to celebrate the solidarity that is, being a woman.
It’s not often I get quiet. Personally, I am generally a loud person. I am a lot to handle sometimes with big opinions and a tenacity to want to use my voice. I like to sing and I am not the smallest human around so I often feel like I take up a lot of space. There’s a lot going on in my head, all the time. It’s frankly an exhausting place to exist because my inner narrative never ceases.
Throw in a rambunctious, playful, mischievous almost 15 month old and an equally loud husband, it’s quite a lot.
I have so much noise in my head I find myself getting burnt out on it when it’s around me and I snap so quickly. Can you relate?
Does the world ever get so loud that you just feel like your head is going to explode and if it doesn’t stop immediately you may just drop dead?
I think for me it’s a pairing of all the noise and then the anxiety that occurs when it’s all building up.
But back to the quiet, I’m sitting in it right now. Not mentally of course, the wheels are still turning, but my house, it’s quiet. I am alone.
My child is sleeping, my husband is sleeping, the washer isn’t running, the neighborhood is sleepy, it’s finally quiet.
It’s exactly what I needed after a week that was supposed to be quiet that ended up not being so quiet after all.
At the direction of the Lord I took a fast from social media last week and I had planned to dedicate my days to sitting in quiet and reading my Bible and meditating on what God had next for me.
Now He did reveal himself, but not in the way I had hoped.
The week came and went and with it came pure chaos. I had to leave my house every single day for one reason or another, or a couple, and if you know me, I am like a minimum of one outing every three days kinda person.
My body was exhausted, my mind was exhausted and with doctors appointments and meetings and groups and commitments and then horrible, horrible sickness to top our week off with all three of us getting a stomach bug within 48 hours- it was not a quiet week.
I felt guilty because part of me felt like because I wasn’t sitting in actual silence with God that He couldn’t still work and fulfill the fast that I was partaking in.
False.
God showed me up for me. In gifts, in blessings, in peace, in joy when I didn’t want to have any, in sweet moments with my son and in the chaos of it all, He ran right along with me. And honestly, I still think it was the perfect week to take off of social media because if I hadn’t been off my phone, my mind wouldn’t have been with God in those moments where I was driving or riding or sitting in waiting rooms, my mind would have been with others and instead of those little moments revealing so much about the stage of life I’m in right now, they would’ve been wasted.
I’m thankful for God’s timing because I wouldn’t have known better and if I took things into my own hands and said I’ll try again another time because of the kind of week I was having, I would’ve missed out on a lot.
I think we have this idea that God only speak to us in quiet places, but in this week I’ve come to find that He speaks to us whenever and wherever, we must only focus in on Him. For instance, even when I was in the midst of some really loud and hectic moments and I desperately needed peace and to hear, simply crying out, I heard. I felt the peace and quiet in my soul and in my heart- it may have not been literal quiet but the heaviness was lifted, I was given clarity and there was a quiet peace about me that I needed.
I was looking for a big revelation last week because I felt for sure that there had to be more to what I was not doing but God didn’t show up in some big revelation. He showed up in the small moments and revealed Himself in little nuggets of wisdom. I am thankful for that because it’s in my nature to get ahead of myself and by allowing me to take in life right where I was at and own the place He’s put me in, instead of making all of these changes, He helped re-center and re-focus me because He was leaving me breadcrumbs instead of one huge picture that I would try to decipher and inevitably decipher it wrong.
All of this to say, because this is a short little encouragement after my very long episodes the last few weeks, if you’re in a season of fast and busy and you’re craving peace and quiet, ask God to meet you right where you’re at with it. Consider fasting from something like social media to help clear your mind and redirect those moments to the anticipation of what He may do there. It may be just a slight shift, but those slight shifts of our eyes up to Heaven is sometimes all we need to get back to where we need to be.
Thank you so much for listening in this week.
Check out the show notes below for information on how to connect, subscribe and share if you’d like and I’ll meet you back here next Wednesday for a new episode, we’ve only got 5 left of the season.
DM me on Instagram @riley_quin or shoot me an email riley@rileyq.com and let me know what you’re going through and if there is a specific topic you want me to talk about and if I haven’t experienced it, I’ll find someone who has to come and chat with us.
Want to share your story?
I just really want to get back to why I created this space, which is to share our experiences and our stories to find solidarity, even in the hardship because you’re not alone. Someone has always walked before you and someone is always walking beside you and behind you so we must share. We are not meant to live in isolation.
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As always, I’m so glad you’re here. You’re wanted, needed and loved. I see you, I hear you and you my love, by the grace of God, you are enough.