01 October 2013

thirty-one days of quiet

As you may or may not know, though I'm not quite sure how you wouldn't know, I was at the influence conference this past weekend. It was a weekend filled with fresh truth and hugged out selfies. It was just what my soul needed.


I thought I would come back from the conference, and maybe you did too, with vision, purpose, dreams, goals, and plans.

One truth that I heard consistently, at least I heard the idea of it, is that gospel and strategy can (and should) go hand in hand.

I've come home home with the word rest, to the sounds of peace, and to the very delicate touch of quiet.

What happens when strategy means quiet?

I thought long on the first flight, continued through my four hour layover, and then throughout my last flight home. I thought long on the word quiet.

Was God really going to call me to be quiet?

Would He actually call me, for a year, to go to a conference, and then send me home with the word quiet?

The answer is YES. It's a loud yes.

I heard God start calling me to quiet a while ago, so long ago that I can't remember when. I just never heard Him give me a date or time, so I was waiting on Him.

I knew quiet was inevitable.

October, outside of today, will be quiet here on nadinewouldsay.

It'll be quiet here on the blog, but my fingers, heart, and words will be scheming together.

I plan to write a lot, to dream a lot, and to just spend a lot of time planning instead of catching up.

One thing I was inspired to do at influence was to better pursue excellence.

Jeff Goins shared in his talk about how we often call people with very thought through blogs narcicistic. People who have good headers, fancy font, sponsored posts, and all sorts of other things - we call them arrogant.

He shared that simply writing words and expecting people to show up in a space where you are putting very little time and effort into - that's actual arrogance.

I've been a bit arrogant. While I do put a whole lot of time in this space, I often do it on the fly. I feel like I'm always just trying to keep up, and I'm rarely ahead of the game.

October is for me to be intentional, and to be better than I have been.

I've been wanting to better define a lot of the spaces on this blog, and to better utilize each dose of internet I've been given. Quiet here will help all of that happen.

One of the hardest aspects of getting quiet is saying a brief see ya later to my Psalm series. I could expand on the reasons why it's hard, but that seems a little bit too loud for a month of quiet. It'll be back in November.

Shauna Niequist shared that she doesn't want to stand before God someday and claim that something was too scary to do, that fear stopped her.

While quieting a blog might seem a bit dramatic for that statement, I get it. It's really scary for me to be quiet for a month, but it's also more important to me to serve God well.

I've heard the whisper of quiet, and while it terrifies me, it's not as terrifying to me as not listening to the voice of God when He tells me what to do.

His call to quiet is purposeful. I don't know its purpose but I do know that God is Lord of every second. So if He says quiet, I have no intention of being loud.

I'll be active on twitter to chat, instagram to hopefully inspire, and I'm always available by email nadine at nadinewouldsay dot com.

See ya in a month.