There is a particular kind of quiet that unsettles a woman of faith. Not the peaceful sort... the other one.

You sit down with your Bible the way you always have. You pray the words you have prayed for 30 years. And nothing comes back. No nudge, no warmth, no sense that anyone is listening on the other end.

If that is where you are this week, I want you to hear this before anything else. You are not doing it wrong.

When you can't hear God, you start quietly auditing yourself

Here is what happens next, because it happened to me.

You start checking. Have I missed something? Is there unconfessed sin sitting somewhere in me? Am I not reading enough, praying enough, giving enough? You go back through the last few months like a woman going through a handbag looking for keys she is certain she put somewhere.

And then, because you have been the strong one for so long, you say nothing about it. Not at church. Not in your small group. You have been the one who prays for everybody else, and it feels almost embarrassing to admit that your own line has gone dead.

This lands hardest, I find, on women who have spent decades pouring out. In a hospital, in a classroom, at a bedside, around a kitchen table. You have been the capable one, the reliable one, the one who holds it all together. And then the children leave, or the job winds down, or the marriage changes shape, and in the space where all that noise used to be there is just... quiet. And you find you do not have much practice at being the one who needs something.

What Scripture actually says about the silence

We are strangely bad at talking about this in church, considering how much of the Bible is about it.

David asks God straight out how long he intends to keep forgetting him, and whether it is going to be forever. That is Psalm 13:1. It was not tidied up or edited out. It sits there in the middle of the songbook, a man of God asking the question you are too polite to ask.

Then there is Elijah, in 1 Kings 19. He has just had the most dramatic public victory of his ministry and he is hiding in a cave wanting to die. God tells him to stand on the mountain, and then sends a wind strong enough to split rocks. Elijah listens. Nothing. An earthquake. Nothing. A fire. Nothing. And then, afterwards, comes the sound of a gentle whisper.

I love that account because the noisy, impressive, obvious channels all came up empty first. And Elijah was not doing anything wrong. He was exhausted, he was frightened, and he was in a cave. God did not scold him for it. God fed him, let him sleep, and then spoke quietly.

Your silence is not a disqualification. It is extremely well documented company.

The problem is often not the silence. It is the channel.

I spent 34 years as a speech and language therapist, most of it as a Highly Specialist. I sat with people who had lost their words. After a stroke, after a brain injury, after a lifetime of not being understood.

And here is what I saw over and over, thousands of times.

When the words went, the person did not go with them.

Communication carried on. It came through a pointed finger, a raised eyebrow, a symbol on a board, a shape scribbled on paper. My job was almost never to restore speech. It was to find the channel that was still open and go in through that door instead.

I did not expect God to teach me my own faith through my caseload. But He did.

Because most of us have been handed exactly 1 channel for hearing from God, and that channel is words. Read the words, say the words, listen out for words. So when the words dry up, we assume the whole line is down.

It usually is not. There is another door, and for a great many of us it opens through our hands.

Think about Hagar in Genesis 16. Pregnant, frightened, alone in the desert, having run away from a household that had treated her badly. Nobody preached at her. She had an encounter, and when she reached for language afterwards she reached for a picture. You are the God who sees me. That is what she called Him. Not the God who explains, or the God who lectures. The God with eyes on her.

That is why, on Thursday's livestream, we doodled an eye.

Is drawing to hear from God actually biblical?

I get asked this a lot, usually carefully, and I think it is a good question rather than a suspicious one. Nobody wants to drift into something that is really about themselves with a bit of Scripture sprinkled over it.

So let me point you at Exodus 31. God is giving instructions for the tabernacle, the most sacred building project in Israel's history, and He names a man called Bezalel. He says He has filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom and understanding and skill in every kind of craft. Working in gold, in stone, in wood.

That is the first person in Scripture explicitly described as filled with the Spirit. Not a prophet. Not a king. A maker.

Creativity is not a spiritual add-on for people who happen to be artistic. It was in the room from the beginning, and it came from God rather than from us. Which matters, because we are not sitting down to summon anything or to find the answer inside ourselves. We are sitting down to pay attention to a God who is already speaking, using a part of ourselves that has usually been sent to bed early.

The Spirit-Led Sketch Method, in 4 steps

This is the practice I use and teach, and it is deliberately small.

1. Prepare. Sit down with paper and a pen. Any paper, any pen. Say out loud that this time belongs to God. That is the whole preparation. No candle required.

2. Ask. One question, said simply. What do you want me to see today?

3. Doodle. Draw one thing. Badly is completely acceptable. Slowly is better than well.

4. Reflect. Write down what came, even if it is one line, even if the line is "nothing came and I am tired".

That is it. It works on the days you have nothing, which is rather the point, because those are the days you need it most.

Try this today: draw an eye

If you do 1 thing after reading this, do this one.

Take a scrap of paper. Draw an eye. Not an anatomical study. Just the almond shape, a circle inside it, a few lashes if you fancy them.

While your hand is busy, ask this: what does God see in me that I have stopped seeing in myself?

Then write around the outside of the eye whatever surfaces. It might be a single word. It might be somebody's name. It might be something you have not said out loud to anyone.

The reason this works is not mystical, it is practical. Your hands occupy the anxious, managing part of your brain... the part that is busy composing a proper prayer and checking whether you are doing it right. While that part is otherwise engaged, something quieter finally gets a turn to speak.

5 things that stop women doing this (and what to do about each)

"I can't draw." Good. Genuinely. Women who can draw tend to make something impressive and feel nothing. The wobbly eye is doing the work here, not the beautiful one. If it helps, use your non-dominant hand for the first minute. It removes the option of being good at it.

"I don't have time." This is 15 minutes, and I would gently ask what you are doing with the 15 minutes before you fall asleep. I am not being smart with you. I am saying the time exists and it is currently going to your phone.

"How do I know it is God and not just me?" Test it the way you would test anything else. Does it agree with Scripture? Does it sound like the character of Jesus? Does it produce peace, or does it produce shame? God convicts, and conviction is specific and hopeful and moves you towards Him. Condemnation is vague, heavy, and moves you away. If what surfaces is a general sense that you are a disappointment, that is not the whisper. Also, write it down and leave it a week. Time is a very good filter.

"Nothing came." Then nothing came, and you still showed up, and that is not a failure. Some of the most significant pages I have made recorded nothing at all at the time. I have gone back months later and found God all over them. Write the date on it and turn the page.

"My journal has to look nice." This is the one that stops more women than all the others put together. If your book is too beautiful to ruin, you will never make anything in it. Buy a cheap one. Ruin the first page deliberately, on purpose, today. Scribble on it. The relief is enormous.

The week the magazine answered me back

I was making a page recently and I was not remotely present. It is autumn, and my head was entirely in the garden. Cutting back, clearing, what needs planting before the frost comes.

Then I looked down at the cutting in my hand, the one I had picked up without reading it. It said autumn jobs.

I laughed out loud, on my own, at the table.

There it was. My distraction, literally in my hand, in print. And I sat with it a while and thought, yes... and there is something God is asking of me this season that is not on that list anywhere. Both things are true. Only 1 of them gets to lead.

I would never have arrived at that by trying harder to concentrate. I got there because my hands were moving and my guard was down.

If you would like to do this with other women

I go live every Thursday and do exactly this, in 15 minutes, and you are always welcome. This week's session is on the Creativity Released channel.

If you would like something to work through for the rest of the month, the Sketch and Collage Collective is my entry level space. It is $8 a month, and every month a new folio of sketching and collage projects lands for you to open and make your way through at your own pace. Nothing live to turn up for. Nothing to catch up on. Just a beautiful thing waiting for you whenever you have half an hour.

You do not have to feel spiritual to start. You just have to pick up the pen.

https://creativesoulspace.com/sketchcollage-collective-only

Bev x

The door that is still open

The doors to Creative Sanctuary are closed right now. But if something in this post has stirred something in you and you do not want to wait alone, you can try 3 of the workshops from inside the Sanctuary for just $9.

Creative Spaces is a small, gentle bundle of 3 creative workshops... each one a different way to slow your mind, hold your pen, and finally hear Him.

Think of it as a quiet sample of what is growing inside.

https://creativesoulspace.com/creative-spaces-9

And if you want the free companion workbook for this whole Created to Dream series, grab your Dream in Colour journal here:

https://creativesoulspace.com/dream

Whatever you are waiting for this morning... wait well. You are not forgotten.

Bev x📖 The two books behind this series, if you would love to go deeper (affiliate links): Created to Dream by Rick Warren: https://amzn.to/4gfREC9 Dream Big by Bob Goff: https://amzn.to/44JOqjb

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A Space to Bring Your Whole Self

And if you're not quite ready for a retreat but want to begin doodling with God today, start here: creativesoulspace.com/quiet — it's just $7 and it's the gentlest possible first step.

Come and find me at https://christianartjournaling.com/creative2026  ~ there's a whole community of women here who are finding their way back to God, one mark at a time.