The Silence

Silence....what an intense word. What lies within the silence? I was thinking today about a song by Caedmons Call called "Center Aisle". In this song it talks about someone who committed suicide. What was so bad in life, that someone would want to take their own life. What if the phone could have rang in the five minutes it took for someone to kill them self, or kill someone else. Maybe it's not even to that extreme, maybe in the five minutes it takes to make some really bad decisions, you wish you wouldn't have made, what if someone would have knocked on the door. How many of those things could we have diverted just by breaking the silence.
It's been almost a year since my friend died. I still question my silence. I knew he was sick that day, I wish I would have been more influential in his life. I wish I would have made him go to the doctor. But I didn't, I know it's not my fault, he was sick and maybe it was just his time to go. Did I truly show enough of the love of Christ to him? He was one messed up person, he was gay, he was addicted to pain pills. Did I really do enough? Maybe he would have never listened, I don't know. I know that I wasn't expecting him to die within an hour from which I saw him. My husband reminds me that there was nothing I could have done, but it reminds me that I don't know what lies within even 30 minutes time. Whatever you need to say, you need to say it now. Whatever you think God is telling you to do, you need to do it now.

At Wal-Mart we have this little thing we call the ten foot rule. Anyone within ten feet of you, you are suppose to greet and ask them if they need help with anything. This is to help to divert people from stealing. What if we practiced that ten foot rule in everyday life? You never know when it could help prevent people from making bad decisions. Shake a hand, give a smile, or "hey, is there anything I can help you with," might be the very thing that saves a life, or prevents someone from making one of those five minute bad decisions.

Do you have times when someone is around you, they are silent and their hearts seem heavy? You can tell that the weight of the world is on their shoulders, and instead of reaching out to them, we ignore what we see. It's time we break the silence, it's time we reach out to the broken hearted, it's time we open up our own hearts and quit being silent to everyone else. Quit wondering why you didn't get a second chance, use the chance God gave you. That second chance may never come.