I was one of the loneliest people on the planet. You can be incredibly well known and very alone. And thats who I was. I was a well-known person who was very alone.

I was driving down a familiar road one fall day when I almost drove off the road, the beauty was so intense. It looked as if God had sent in a team of the world's finest artists overnight-and I was privy to the opening day of his spectacle. As I slowly drove along this festive row, leaves danced in the air and brushed against my windshield. It seemed as if I had landed in Oz. I was strongly tempted to get out and clap at God's imagination.

If we mistake God's silence for indifference, we are the most miserable of people. If we give up when we no longer understand, we reject His caring, steadfast love and cut ourselves off from our only real hope.

God has promised that whatever you face, you are not alone. He knows your pain. He loves you. And He will bring you through the fire.

But the witness of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus is that God's most difficult promise has been kept.

It takes deliberate and continuous effort to carve out time in our overfull schedules to listen to the voice of God.

My times of silence before God are very important to me now. I put everything else down, every word away, and I am with the Lord. When I'm quiet, life falls into perspective for me. I have a very active mind and I'm a worrier, but in those moments when I choose to put that away, I rest beside the Shepherd in still places. Why don't you give yourself a gift today? Turn off the television or the car stereo, put down the newspaper or the business plan, and in the quietness, rest for a while beside the Shepherd of your soul.