A Voice I Knew by Heart

For years, I believed silence was something I longed for.

Yet whenever it came, I found a way to fill it.

I filled my days with clients and my evenings with unfinished work. I made plans to write, reflect and spend more time simply being, but there was always one more person who needed me, one more task that could not wait.

Busyness had become more than a habit. It was the place I hid.

I knew how to set goals. I knew how to achieve them. What I did not yet know was how to sit quietly beside the questions I could not answer.

Nearly ten years had passed since my first forty-day pilgrimage. During those years, I had begun to understand that silence was not empty. It held the things we could no longer hear beneath the noise—the longings of the soul, the beliefs we had inherited and the truths waiting beneath everything we thought we knew.

Still, there was one experience I rarely spoke about.

One Easter, I sat in church listening to a story I had heard many times before. My attention wandered, and I opened my Bible to a passage in Matthew I did not remember noticing.

It described the moment of Jesus’s death: the temple curtain tearing, the earth shaking and the tombs opening. It spoke of people who had died appearing to those within the city.

I read the words again.

Then once more.

I had spent years trying to understand where the boundaries lay between the world I could see and the one I had occasionally sensed. Yet here, within a familiar story, was something strange and easily passed over—something that allowed a question to rise within me.

What if there is more than I have allowed myself to believe?

The question carried me back to the night of 6 January 1992.

A light filled my bedroom. An angel was in the room, and although part of me wanted to understand what was happening, another part was afraid to look.

Then I heard my grandmother’s voice.

She had died, but I knew her voice immediately. Some voices live too deeply within us to be mistaken.

“Do not be afraid,” she told me. “Your fear stops you from hearing from the heavens. Listen to the angel in the room and write down all he shows you.”

I did not know what to do with those words.

I did not know how to explain them without being questioned, dismissed or misunderstood. So I carried the experience quietly, returning to it and retreating from it, nurturing it for a while and then trying to reason it away.

For thirty years, the memory remained within me.

What was planted that night began as the smallest of seeds. Through seasons of belief and doubt, silence and searching, it continued to grow. Its roots reached more deeply into the story of who I was, even when I was not ready to speak of it.

Perhaps that is why I kept myself so busy.

In the silence, I might hear her again.

The seedling has become a tree now—rooted, strengthened by time and reaching towards a light I no longer need to explain away.

Perhaps bearing fruit begins here: not by proving what happened, but by finally finding the courage to tell the story.