by Sean Samuel
The first thing they don’t tell you about finding peace is that it’s not quiet at all.
Not at first.
When I stopped praying the old way, I thought the silence would bring comfort. But instead, it brought noise — the kind you can’t hear with your ears but feel in your chest.
The questions.
The guilt.
The echo of every sermon, every “Amen,” every fear that maybe I’d gone too far this time.
It’s strange — how when you finally decide to listen for God instead of talk to Him, all the old voices show up. The ones from your childhood. The ones that told you faith had rules, and you were breaking them.
I tried to drown them out. But silence has a way of making you face what you’ve been avoiding.
One morning, I sat on my porch before the world woke up. The sky was that deep blue that only happens before sunrise. I closed my eyes and tried to meditate — just breathe and be. But my mind started running like a wild horse.
Every mistake. Every disappointment. Every unanswered prayer.
And right there, in the middle of that storm, I realized something.
Maybe silence isn’t about escaping the noise.
Maybe it’s about hearing it clearly enough to understand it.
The longer I sat there, the more the thoughts started to slow down. The guilt softened. The noise settled. And what was left wasn’t emptiness — it was awareness.
I wasn’t lost. I was just learning a new language — the language of presence.
Now when silence gets loud, I don’t fight it.
I sit in it.
Because sometimes peace doesn’t whisper — it confronts you. It unpacks everything you’ve been carrying and asks, “Are you ready to let this go?”
And that’s where the real work begins.
If you’re somewhere between belief and becoming — keep sitting. Keep breathing.
Peace isn’t found in running from the noise. It’s found in learning to hear it differently.
This journey is teaching me that maybe God was never outside the silence.
Maybe He is the silence.
If this spoke to you, stick around.
I’ll be sharing more each week as I dive deeper into what happens after you stop praying the old way. You can subscribe to get updates, or drop a comment below — tell me what silence has been teaching you lately.