Interesting People in Regent

This is one interesting girl who LOVES to walk. One of the students in Regent College and this is one of her recent articles in our student newsletter, also featured in her blog. Yes, a 4-month walk! She's inspired me to consider walking back to Malaysia!

Silence- A Reflection on the Appalachian Trail

Hey there everyone, the following is an article that got published in my school's student newspaper a couple days ago. It is a reflection on my experience of silence while walking the Appalachian Trail about a year and a half ago. I just finished writing a paper on silence and solitude in the works of Thomas Merton so this theme has been running through my head lately.

If you want to read more about my trek, here is the link to my online journal.

A Journey of Silence

"Oh America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silence God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains are really for."

-Thomas Merton

The spring and summer before I came to Regent I went for a walk. Actually quite a long, 2400 km, 4-month walk through 11 states in the Appalachian Mountains on the East Coast of the USA. I walked alone, through blizzards in Georgia and North Carolina, joyfully through the gentle, restful hills of Virginia, onward to civil war monuments in Maryland and rocks in Pennsylvania, through New Jersey, land of water and life. Onward to the scorching heat of New York, then celebrity spotting in Connecticut and finally to Massachusetts where my journey would come to end.

It was in the silence of the forest that I began to know who I truly was. It was where I knew what I feared, where I understood the compulsions that shape my life and my interactions with people. It is in the silence that I began to know the bitterness and the hurt in my life because of the people from my past who I hadn't thought about in years. It was in walking that I was able to forgive them, to pray for them and to not let this anger consume me. In was in recovering from hypothermia that death became real and that I understood the phrase "to live is Christ and to die is gain." It was in the sickness that would end the hike that I began to see how little I really trusted God and that He was really just an idol I had made in my own image. It was in the silence that I knew how often I spoke empty words, void of any real meaning.

It is in the quiet of the forest that I truly know God. For sometimes I think that it is not in the city, amidst the chaos of study and work and ministry that God is most present with us. Perhaps when I talk less, God talks more.It is in the mountains watching the sun fade over the hill on a still night that I know God's quiet presence.Is it in the fury of a thunder and hail storm atop a mountain ridge that I know something of God's power. It is in the tiredness of a 25 mile day that I know what it means to be weary and burdened and to come to Jesus and find rest.It is upon reaching a gushing spring on a scorching hot day that I know God's abundant provision in my life. It is when the skies turn dark in the middle of the day and the forest is shrouded in blackness that I know the darkness in my own life. It is in interacting with other tired wanderers that I feel most able to be myself. It is in the silent places of life that I am changed.

Sometimes when you are alone for that long you just have nothing left to think about or to occupy your mind with. Maybe God's presence is closest to us in this state. Maybe that's what prayer is all about, to be emptied of oneself in order that God might fill us, speak to us and occupy the places in our lives that we so desperately want to cling to for ourselves. To move beyond words and the space where we are conscious of our own praying and contemplation is to move within the depth of God's own intimate union within the trinity. For just as Christ emptied Himself and became nothing upon the cross, so too are we called to empty ourselves. Without solitude, we are not able to be truly present to people and serve them with the humility with which Christ serves us.

And yet at times, it was hard to be confronted with my own humanity, with the presence of God. To realize the depth of my sinfulness and the patterns of sin by which my life was often shaped was disturbing. To know the living God is a scary thing and yet in solitude at least I was confronted with that choice. To be still or to listen to music. To walk alone or to seek out company to fill the loneliness. To embrace emptiness or to fill my mind with idols. To find life in Christ or to seek the pleasures of this world. To trust or to fear. I wish I could say that I chose the former more often than the latter.

So as I sit at my house in Vancouver that I share with 25 other people I wonder about the contradictions in my life. I look out the window at the ocean and mountains of the North Shore and know that I'd rather be there than here. How to live in this world but not be of it? How to know myself and God when the silence seems so fleeting and transitory? How to live in and speak to a culture that so often seems to want to fill the silent places with noise, bury our loneliness with entertainment and hide our true selves at the expense of knowing who we fundamentally are and who God really is?