What Happens When Going Silent
It was supposed to be a good day.
I was finally spending some quality time with someone I deeply care about, a day we’d both been looking forward to, and within the first few minutes of the morning I said something. It involved a fairly ordinary heart-warming story of a memory I had in a similar location years ago, though I barely remember the exact words I used to describe it. But it touched something tender in them, and I watched the change happen across their face. They went still, then somewhere far away, and then they left the room.
They were gone, and then silent, for hours.
I sat there with my coffee going cold and my mind ran ahead of me the way it usually does. I’d ruined the day, I figured. They were angry. They were pulling away. I’d done something absolutely unforgivable without knowing what it was. Every minute of silence became more evidence, and by the time an hour had passed I’d built a whole case against myself. I felt abandoned and very alone.
Later, when they could talk, I learned what had actually happened. They’d been overwhelmed. They needed time to calm themselves before they could say anything at all, much less anything that would be productive or kind. They hadn’t been punishing me or withdrawing their love. They’d been simply doing the best they knew to do.
Their reality and my conclusion could hardly have been further apart. And yet the hours I’d spent alone with my thoughts still happened. The impact was still there.
I don’t think there was anything particularly unusual about that morning. I’ve lived some version of it with friends, with coworkers, with my son, in every relationship I’ve ever had that went deeper than small talk. And I’ve been on the other side of it, too, the one who goes quiet while someone else sits wondering what they did. It’s one of the most regular human-like things two people can do to each other.
When a moment like that happens, I find myself reaching for categories. Is this “the flesh”? Is it the heart, which Jeremiah says is deceitful above all things? Is it my trauma, waking up and reading every silence as abandonment because silence once meant something much worse? Is it theirs? Is it sinful nature? Or is it just two people’s thinking misfiring at the same time?
And how in the world am I supposed to tell the difference?
When the Old Testament speaks of the heart, the word is lev, and it means far more than what we usually mean. For us the heart is mostly feelings, set against the mind. But in Hebrew the lev thinks. It plans, remembers, decides, understands. When Solomon asks God for “an understanding mind” (1 Kings 3:9), the Hebrew is literally a listening lev. The ancient Israelites didn’t draw a hard line between what we feel and what we think. It was all one thing.
Paul’s “flesh,” sarx, isn’t simply the body, either. It’s the whole person turned away from God, the self curved in on itself. So the categories I was trying to separate (thinking, feeling, wound, sin) overlap far more than my boxes allow.
Hebrews says that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). I notice who does the dividing in that verse. God’s Word does. I don’t think I was ever meant to do it myself.
The disciples once asked Jesus for exactly the sort of category I wanted.
They passed a man who’d been blind from birth and asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). They wanted the category to fit it in: His fault or someone else’s?
Jesus refused both options. “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (9:3).
I don’t want to stretch that too far though. Sin is real. Wounds are real, too, and understanding them helps. But I wonder if my urgent need to diagnose a hard moment (trauma or sin, mine or theirs) is a bit like the disciples’ question. Precise, and slightly beside the point.
The other side is that: my conclusion was mine.
Nobody handed me the story I told myself that morning. I wrote it. The leap from silence to abandonment came from somewhere in me, from years of learning that a withdrawn person is a dangerous one, and from a habit of scanning a silent room for a threat. That’s not the other person’s responsibility. It’s mine to bring to God and keep working on.
Proverbs is blunt about this: “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and his shame” (18:13). I’d answered before I heard. I’d answered on the other person’s behalf, actually, and then argued with my own answer for hours.
At the same time, silence isn’t weightless. When someone walks away without a word, even for good reasons, the person left behind is alone with no information, and that has an effect too. Both can logically be true in nearly every version of this I’ve lived.
Eli made the same mistake with Hannah.
She’d gone up to the temple at Shiloh so heartbroken over her childlessness that she prayed without making a sound. “Hannah was speaking in her heart; only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard. Therefore Eli took her to be a drunken woman” (1 Samuel 1:13).
The priest of Israel looked at a woman pouring out her soul and decided she’d been drinking. Her silence, misread, became an accusation.
What changed everything was that Hannah told him. “No, my lord, I am a woman troubled in spirit… I have been pouring out my soul before the LORD” (1:15). Once he heard it, Eli’s whole posture shifted. He blessed her and sent her home in peace.
I’ve been Eli more often than I’d like to admit. I see a silence and supply my own explanation, and my explanation is very often wrong.
“The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out” (Proverbs 20:5).
Deep water. That’s what someone’s silence usually is: something going on far below the surface that I can’t see from where I’m standing. The wise response isn’t to guess at what’s down there. It’s to draw it out, patiently, the way you lower a bucket into a well and wait for it to fill.
Israel nearly went to war over a misread gesture once.
After the conquest, the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh went back across the Jordan and built a large altar by the river. When the rest of Israel heard about it, they assumed the worst: rebellion, idolatry, a breaking away from the Lord. “The whole assembly of the people of Israel gathered at Shiloh to make war against them” (Joshua 22:12).
But before marching, they sent Phinehas and ten chiefs to ask. The eastern tribes explained that the altar wasn’t for sacrifice at all. It was a witness, a reminder to their children that they, too, belonged to the Lord, even with a river between them (22:24-28). The delegation went home satisfied, and the altar was named Ed, which means Witness, “for it is a witness between us that the LORD is God” (22:34).
An entire war averted because somebody asked before they acted.
And yet, intentions don’t erase impact.
Nobody actually meant harm– I didn’t intend to touch a wound, and they didn’t intend for me to feel abandoned. Both of us were still affected.
Leviticus makes room for this in a way I find surprisingly helpful. It describes sins committed “unintentionally” (Leviticus 4:2, 4:27), the Hebrew shegagah, an error made by straying without knowing. Those still required an offering. The harm was acknowledged even though it wasn’t intended. But the response wasn’t condemnation. It was repair, a way back.
I think that’s the right posture in nearly every relationship. Not “you meant to hurt me,” and not “it doesn’t count because I didn’t mean it.”
Something more like: this affected me, I know you didn’t intend it, so let’s find our way back to each other.
When Colin was younger, I taught him to tell me when he was “flooded,” when his feelings rose so high he couldn’t think clearly and needed a few minutes before he could talk. (John Gottman uses the term for what happens to the body in conflict, when the heart rate climbs and reason goes offline.) It’s been one of the most useful words in our house. It tells me what’s happening without his having to explain it in the moment, and it tells me he’ll come back once the water goes down.
You don’t have to explain, and you don’t have to fix anything right then. Just handing over that one word prevents someone having to guess, having to sit building a case, or having old alarms start ringing over a silence that means something else entirely. It’s a small thing, admittedly. But I’ve come to think of it as an altar by the river. A witness standing between two people that says: this isn’t rebellion. This isn’t abandonment. I’m still here. I just need some time.
The rest of that day turned out fine, a few hours later than planned. I didn’t stop thinking about the morning, but by the afternoon I could see it differently.
