The Silence You Keep Filling Before It Has a Chance to Say Anything

The elevator ride is four floors. The walk to the coffee machine is ninety seconds. There are two full minutes before the meeting starts. Every one of those gaps gets a podcast, a headline, a text thread — filled before the silence even has time to register as empty.

C.H.E.W. with Me

New here? What is CHEW? — a 30-second practice that grows into a day woven with God’s love.

C – Clarity: The Reflex to Never Leave a Gap Empty

It isn’t information you’re actually after in most of those moments. It’s the discomfort of an unoccupied thirty seconds — the itch to have something, anything, arriving in your ears or your eyes before the quiet has a chance to show you anything.

H – Hear: Like a Weaned Child With Its Mother

“O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.” (Psalm 131:1-2)

David wrote this short psalm as one of the Songs of Ascents, sung by pilgrims traveling up to Jerusalem for worship — a song meant to settle a restless heart before arriving in God’s presence. The Hebrew word behind “calmed and quieted,” damam, describes a stillness that was deliberately settled, not stillness that simply happened on its own. And the image David reaches for is precise: gamul, a weaned child. Not an infant still nursing, who cries the instant it isn’t being fed. A weaned child doesn’t cry the instant it isn’t being fed — it has learned that closeness to its mother was never dependent on constant consumption. The security came first. The quiet followed.

This is what God’s love actually makes possible in a distraction-saturated day: a soul secure enough that it doesn’t need every gap filled to prove it’s safe. The quiet itself becomes evidence of trust, not evidence that something’s missing.

E – Exchange: What the Noise Is Actually Guarding

The instinct to fill every gap isn’t neutral. Every gap you rush to fill is a quiet defense — you’re avoiding the moment you’d find out if God’s presence alone is enough. The podcast queue and the notification badge do the same job the crying does for the nursing infant — they keep the silence from ever having the chance to test what your soul actually trusts.

Because God’s love has already secured you the way a mother secures a weaned child — with nothing left to earn for the closeness — how does that change what you reach for the next time you have a quiet moment?

W – Walk: Leave One Gap Unfilled Today

Pick the next small gap that shows up — an elevator ride, a walk to your car, the two minutes before a call connects — and leave it empty. No podcast, no phone, no scrolling. Just notice what surfaces when nothing is arriving to fill it.

Closing question: What are you actually afraid you’ll hear if you let the next thirty seconds stay quiet?