The changing of the seasons has a way of waking me up to take stock of where I am along my life’s journey—in terms of body, mind, spirit, family and career—and whether I’m listening to and heeding the call to wherever it is that God or the universe is calling me to serve. When my head doesn’t edit what is in my heart and my soul, I’m able to get out of the way and surrender to the current of the spirit and wherever it is that it is guiding me.

For me, tapping into that “still, small voice” requires all the intentionality I can muster so that I can be quiet and sit with God. In the Hebrew Bible, Elijah met God not in the “great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces” or the earthquake that followed or even in the fire that followed the earthquake. Instead, he found God in the “sound of sheer silence” that followed (1 Kings 19: 11-12). As a native of the San Francisco Bay Area who vividly remembers the quake of 1989, I can attest to the eerie silence that followed after the scattered sirens of car alarms and the barking dogs died down.

Elijah’s encounter with God reminds me that even as the fires currently burn through the coastal mountain range of my native San Mateo County and cities burn across the country as the tinderbox of rage and oppression catch fire from the sparks flying off from the clashing of violence against desperation and determination, I need to tune into the sound of the sheer silence to hear where God is calling me. And then, I ask for the courage to act.