"Morning after morning I returned to my hillside room to reach out for the stillness as a thirsty man reaches for a cup of cold water. I had never experienced anything like this before: a silence so complete that it seemed palpable, sensate, an entity in itself. "Yet the quietness was no sterile emptiness. Those who craved oblivion could not have tolerated this. Or those who wanted to escape themselves would flee this. Perhaps if I could stretch out my hand and stop the clock of time or listen deeply enough, I would not then miss the gifts the silence held out. For now I knew that at the heart of the stillness there was food to feed upon, wisdom to accept humbly, satisfaction to be quaffed. Irresistibly the silence drew me because it promised me that where there was hunger there would also be bread.
"And slowly, almost imperceptibly, out of the stillness during that second week my answer started coming -- only not in any way I had expected. No effort was made to answer my 'Why?'. Instead, I began to know, incredibly, unmistakably, beyond reason and beyond doubting that I, Christy Huddleston, was loved -- tenderly, totally. Love filled me, washed over me, flowed around me. I did not know what to do with love as strong as this. Back off from its intensity? Embrace it?
"My tears flowed. I could not stop them.
"Then the thought came: wasn't this the confirmation for which I had asked? This love disclosing itself was no cosmic Creator of a mechanistic universe, for the revelation was intimate, personal."
-Catherine Marshall, Christy (1967), pp. 433-434.
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