Before the Silence

Stumbling into the nothing was an accident. Walking back in is a choice. - Intro to 30 Days of Silence

Path to Silent Retreat

Before the Silence

The Survivor story is finished. Here is what it was actually about, and where it was always taking me.

We finished the Survivor story last Sunday.

Thirty-nine days on an island, seventeen weeks on the page, and now it is done. The torches are out. The votes are read. Denise won the million dollars, I tied for second, and I flew home with a hundred-thousand-dollar Fan Favorite check and not the faintest idea what to do with the rest of my life.

I have been thinking about what that story was actually about. Because it was always about more than the game.

When I auditioned, I told the producers the truth as I knew it. I loved games, nature, psychology, and a challenge. All of that was real. But the deeper reason I got on that plane was a single sentence a man had said to me over lunch a year earlier, while my marriage and my faith and my income were all coming apart at the same time. I had asked Erwin McManus how a person finds out who they really are. He did not hesitate. “Put yourself in situations where you are not in control,” he said, “and you will find out.”

I left that lunch bewildered. I had always assumed I knew who I was. I was Lisa. The good girl. The good Christian. The one you could count on to do the right thing, every time, no exceptions. What I did not understand yet was that I had spent fifty years building that person on purpose, brick by careful brick, because somewhere underneath it all I believed that if I were not good, I would not be loved. Worth was something I earned. If I built something, performed something, achieved something, then I was someone. If I stopped, I was no one.

So I flew to the Philippines to find out who I was when I was not in control. And the island obliged.

If you joined somewhere in the middle of these Survivor posts, here is the short version of what happened, though the short version misses the point. I lied. I made a promise to Malcolm and then broke it to save my own game. I blindsided people I had genuinely come to love. I cried on national television in a way that became an internet meme. The careful, controlled, capable good-Christian-woman I had constructed over half a century did not survive thirty-nine days without a script. Watching my own performance crumble in real time, I said, “I love this game, but I think it is too big for me.”

It was not too big for me. It was just bigger than the version of me I had been willing to let anyone see.

What undid me out there was not losing. It was grace. When I betrayed Malcolm and braced for the anger and retribution I was certain I deserved, he walked down the beach, looked at me, and forgave me before I could even finish apologizing. “You were just playing the game” he said. “We’re all just playing a game.” I did not know what to do with that. I had spent my entire life inside a faith that taught me love had to be earned, that mistakes were met with shame, that I had to stay one step ahead of my own sinful heart at all costs. And here was a man with no stake whatsoever in my soul, handing me, free of charge, the one thing I had been trying to earn my way toward for decades.

That was the moment so many of you wrote to me about. You told me you, too, had met more grace outside the church than inside it. I want to come back to that another day, because it deserves its own conversation. For now I will just say this: grace was the first crack in the wall.

But the island was not the bottom of it. The island only loosened the soil.

The pivotal moment came later. Months after I flew home, on a couch in Los Angeles, after another relationship had ended and another season of loss had piled up on top of it. My father. My uncle. An inheritance quietly taken. My mother’s diagnosis. I had run through every method I knew for not feeling it. Food. Wine. Books I could not concentrate on long enough to finish a page. Anything at all to stay one step ahead of the emptiness I had been outrunning my entire life. And then, sitting there with nothing left to reach for, a question rose up in me. It came almost like it had been crouched in the bushes, waiting for the right moment to spring.

“What are you trying so desperately not to feel?”

I have already written about what happened next, so I will not retell all of it here. I let the feeling come. I was certain it would kill me. It did not. And when I finally turned and looked the thing full in the face and asked it its name, the answer was the very one I had spent fifty years arranging my life to avoid. The void itself.

It was nothing.

Underneath everything I had built and performed and controlled and polished, there was nothing. I was nothing. That was the secret I had been attempting to keep at of my awareness with food and faith and busyness and good behavior since I was a child.

And then the floor of the nothing gave way, and underneath it was everything.

That is where the Survivor story ends. Not with a million dollars. With something even more valuable than that. It ends with me on a couch, discovering that the emptiness I had been terrified of for as long as I could remember was not a void to be filled but a doorway to be walked through. That I could be nothing, do nothing, prove nothing, and still be held. Still be loved. That in the nothing, of all places, was everything.

I thought, at the time, that I had arrived somewhere. That the question had finally been answered and I could close the book and move along.

I had not, and it was not, and I could not.

Because here is what I have since learned about that kind of doorway. Stumbling through it once, by accident, because life kicked the props out from under you, is not the same as walking through it on purpose. The island took my control away from me. I did not hand it over. And what I found myself wanting to know next was whether I could choose the empty space on purpose, instead of waiting for it to ambush me on a Tuesday afternoon.

So a few months later, I did something that, to nearly everyone who knew me, made no sense at all. I drove myself to a retreat house, and I stopped talking. Not for a weekend. For thirty days. Thirty days of silence, with no activity to disappear into, no performance to keep up, no one to be good for. Just me, and God, and the nothing I had finally stopped running from.

On the first evening, before the silence began, they asked each of us what had drawn us there. I told them I wanted time and space to hear the voice of God within my heart with more clarity and direct experience. A few days in, I came across a line in a book I was reading that said it far better than I ever could. It was about creating an empty space, a kind of waiting room, so that the unexpected everything could rise up out of the nothingness. I read it and went still. It had named, in one sentence, the exact thing I had stumbled into on that couch in Los Angeles, and the exact thing I had now come looking for on purpose.

That is where we are going next.

If the Survivor story was the question arriving uninvited, the silent retreat is me finally answering the door on purpose. It is quieter than the island. There are no challenges, no tribal councils, no cameras, no million dollars at the end. But it is, in its own way, the harder thing. Because there is nowhere to hide in silence. And by then I had spent a lifetime becoming very, very good at hiding.

I would love for you to come with me.

Before we go, I want to hear from you.

Erwin’s words to me, the ones that put me on the plane, were these: put yourself in situations where you are not in control, and you will find out who you are. Has there been a time in your own life when losing control showed you something true, something you could not have seen any other way? I would love to know what it showed you.

And then, as always, whatever else came up for you while you were reading this, whatever it stirred or reminded you of or made you want to say out loud, please put it in the comments. I read every single one. And the things you share are so often exactly where I find my way into what to write on Thursdays.

See you in the silence.