Formed in Silence by Matt Schmuker

Chapter One ...

A Crucial Shift

Just hold on loosely, but don't let go, if you cling too tightly, you're gonna lose control.

-"Hold on Loosely"by 38 Special

My spiritual life was on the verge of collapse. The crushing weight of depression and exhaustion from hacking away at the Hydralike assault on my mind had brought me to the end of my rope. With nothing to grasp and with no strength to hold on, I feared that I would plummet into darkness. Having tried it all, none of it was doing the trick. None of it was working. Sitting in my dorm room reflecting on all the various strategies, I despaired, recognizing that trying harder only made it worse.

It wasn't for lack of effort either. I wasn't lacking dedication or grit in my spiritual life. I had learned from my Christian tradition that the solution to our problems is to do more good and to avoid evil. Read Scripture more, pray more, volunteer more, recite Bible verses more, give more, worship more, attend church more. Also watch TV less, hang with the wrong crowd less, speak neg- ative words less, listen to secular music less, read non-Christian books less, and try to sin less. Grading solely on those criteria, I had an A+. I prayed two hours every morning, read the Bible for at least an hour daily, attended multiple church services weekly, and volunteered. I gave 20 percent of my income, worshiped fervently, spoke only words that agreed with Scripture, listened to preaching cassette tapes constantly, rid my life of any known sins, got prayed for, attended deliverance classes, and said deliverance prayers.

I report none of this to boast but to give you an accurate picture of the solutions applied. It's not to say there were zero gains from all those activities. I had my moments, but none seemed to stick or relieve the torment in my head.

I had grown up the youngest of three in a Christian home; we attended weekly services at a nondenominational charismatic evan- gelical megachurch. At age eleven, I began to live a duplicitous life. One persona emerged at home, and another at school. Quiet and well-behaved at home, I supplied comic relief for the family. At school, I morphed to become part of the “cool” crowd. To ingratiate myself, I would be cruel to the "out" crowd and super loyal to the "in" crowd. My comic relief, at the expense of the uncool kids, became a weapon at school while also serving as a shield against the internal pain of rejection that my mind worked hard to ignore. Against my professed Christian standards, I began to drink, smoke, and party in the seventh grade, which helped my standing with the in crowd and numbed my emotional pain.

Around this time, I began a quest to find a girlfriend who could convince me of my worth and lovableness. That pursuit yielded only rejection, as each girlfriend inevitably felt the weight of my insecurities. One memory stands out. I was sitting in my garage on the phone with the stretchy spiral cord shut in the door, with enough slack for me to pace or sit while maintaining a wall of privacy from my parents' listening ears.

It seemed to me that the relationship was going well, and for whatever reason, I assumed that expressing my insecurities would help. Having seen this work in several movies, I told her how I felt. I began pouring out that she was so important to me, that she was the only person who made me feel like I mattered, and that I desperately needed her. Eagerly anticipating her reassurance, a horrifying awkward silence came instead, followed by a sinking feeling in my gut, and confirmed by a subsequent breakup shortly after we'd hung up.

My search continued while I learned not to be so overt with my insecurities, but my clinginess and covert jealousy had the same chilling effect. I played football to try to boost my sense of worth and value. When coaches recognized my contributions to the team, it gave me a taste of the validation my heart craved.

Attending church each week, I habitually recited the salvation prayer at the end of the service to receive Christ, just to be sure. My view of salvation was that reciting a prayer was like purchasing a bus ticket. If I died, I could pull that ticket out of my back pock- et, wave it around, and hop on the bus to heaven. I had some vague concept of living my life for Jesus, but that seemed like something reserved for full-fledged adults, not adolescents.

The summer before my senior year of high school, things were piling up inside my soul and depressing me to the breaking point. While being a bully gave me a false sense of superiority, being cru- el was also soul-crushing; hating others and being hated by others sucked. The crowd that had my loyalty liked to occasionally reject group members for sport, and it happened to be my turn. To complicate things, my girlfriend made me feel genuinely pursued for the first time, but she cheated on me several times, making her a hard habit to break. My attempts to bury my pain through popularity, bullying, girlfriends, and sports were no longer ef- fective. My mind would wander to thoughts of suicide. It never progressed beyond contemplating it, and even when I allowed myself to entertain the idea, it felt like an absurd overreaction. Still, it alerted me that something wasn't right.

Around that time, something caught me off guard. Jason, a friend of mine, had a radical change in his life. He suddenly became a very kind individual and began talking to everyone about Jesus. It was rare to see him without a Bible under his arm. Something happened to him that seemed genuine, sincere, and attractive. Hanging around Jason challenged my notion that being serious about Jesus was only for adults. His example unmoored me, but more than that, his peace and joy spoke to the deep longing in my own heart.

Bumming around one day in the musty wood-paneled basement of a friend's house, Jason became the topic of conversation. They called him a “freak” and other unkind words, and I had the distinct feeling of a line being drawn in the sand of my heart. The choice was to be complicit by remaining silent or to speak up. Bracing myself, pushing past the fear, and breaking through the chatter, I said that Jason was doing a good thing and that I was a Christian too—with no evidence other than my sudden confession. That confrontation provided a needed boost to do what came next.

Something inside was compelling me to discover what had happened to Jason. After weightlifting at school, I waited for Jason so I could accompany him to the parking lot. While I had been dribbling a basketball against the hardwood floor as the clank of free weights rang out, Jason approached me. Pretending to finish shooting hoops, I joined him in the hallway. After engaging in small talk, I finally asked what happened to him. I don't recall anything of what he said that day. More powerful than his words was a palpable, unseen love wooing me from within. After saying goodbye and entering my 1989 Ford Taurus in the high school parking lot, I raised both my arms and said something like, “Jesus, I surrender. I don't want anything else but what you have for me.' God's unseen love crashed over me in electric waves as I wept my car. My life's trajectory was forever altered by my experience of God's presence that day, and that encounter has served as an anchor in my life countless times. Subsequently, I owned up to my duplicitous ways to my parents. I stayed home instead of going out with friends, lost my passion for football, and gave up on finding my worth in girlfriends. All of my energy was channeled into pursuing God.

I remember one early experience of hearing God's voice. I had agreed to attend and help at a kickoff event for an after-school Christian club, but I also really wanted to hear a guest speaker at my church. Going to see the guest speaker seemed the obvi- ous choice until I providentially opened my larger-than-necessary black pleather King James Version Bible to the words of Jesus in bold red letters stating, “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay." Feeling the sweet piercing conviction of those words, my willing but begrudging "yea” stood, and I attended the kickoff event.

What felt like an insignificant act of obedience ended up being instrumental in meeting the woman who would become my wife. At the kickoff event, I had my first conversation with Kelly. Lamenting, I told her my desire had been to see a guest speaker at church that night but that my mom would allow me to skip school on Thursday to see the same speaker during the day. Unexpectedly, my Conair landline telephone rang out later that evening. Kelly called to ask if she could get a ride to the event on Thursday.

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It was hard to believe that a beautiful girl had just asked to join me in playing hooky to attend a church event. Most girls in my school considered my newfound devotion to God a major turnoff. She was all in, and she was also the most kindhearted woman I had ever met. I cannot recall ever hearing her put down anyone or say a mean word to someone. We were married four and a half years later. Without the divine intervention to keep my “yea,” we wouldn't be together.

As senior year drew to a close, my prayers increasingly became focused on what to do with my life. I desired God's will for my life but had no clue what that was. I knew only that I had a desire to help people. Becoming a police officer was my first idea, and I enrolled in the community college criminal justice program.

In the summer before college, I worked at my dad's factory to earn money for school. The constant whir of machines, the loud clanking steel, and the smell of grease filled long, sweaty summer days on the furniture assembly line. Hot sparks flew from the welder where I toiled, occasionally leaving holes in my shirt and minor burns on my skin. The work was repetitive and could be done mindlessly. Taking advantage of the time afforded by the mind-numbing work, I meditated on Scripture. One particular day I had been reading the Gospels and continued the meditation while rhythmically welding steel together. In that particular passage, Jesus spoke about blaspheming the Holy Spirit. I wondered what that meant. Suddenly, horrible curses against God ripped through my mind. Panic overtook me, thinking I'd just committed the unpardonable sin! Swirling in fear and doubling over as anxiety twisted my stomach, my heart caved in.

Hopeless, I agonized to my parents about what happened. They did their best to reassure me that I had done nothing wrong and that my soul was safe. Eventually, I accepted that I hadn't done anything wrong, but the gates to my mind had broken off their hinges. Terror overtook me with one horrible thought after another. At times it was relentless; other times it lurked in the background, but it permeated my life for years.

Surprisingly and thankfully, my passion for knowing God and following his will for my life survived the assault. I abandoned my pursuit of police work and decided to attend a two-year Bible school in Dallas with two primary goals: further pursue God and defeat the darkness clouding my mind.

That brought me to the point of despondency in my dorm room I shared at the opening of this chapter. For two years, I had battled with what I described at the time as "not being able to control my thoughts." My mind looped obsessively, terrified by my thoughts while I employed herculean effort to make those thoughts go away, which to my utter dismay only made them more intense. On my worst days, it was easy to picture myself ending up in a padded room wearing a straitjacket. On my best days, at the edge of my mind was the foreboding feeling that the next insidious thought was just around the corner, waiting to consume me. I believed I was engaging in what my tradition calls spiritual warfare, and I hypervigilantly monitored my thoughts and fought like hell against anything that entered my mind that seemed ungodly or out of sync with Scripture.

Even thinking about it now feels exhausting. Tired, hopeless, and defeated but in need of rescue, I often worked up the courage to confide in others who could potentially help, only to be instruct- ed to do the things I was already doing. Some would say condescendingly or sincerely, "Just stop thinking about it." That exhortation floored me. That is what I'm trying to do! Are you kidding me? To stop thinking about it would be amazing! Feeling alone and irrep- arably broken, I began questioning my salvation experience that had seemed so real and powerful three years earlier. A terrifying thought circled the edges of my consciousness, taunting me that I had irrevocably lost my salvation.

Feeling myself plunge into darkness while sitting in my Bible college dorm, I desperately ran my thumb along the worn gold edging of my Bible. Landing on the Gospel of John, I began to read the words of Jesus and how he promised he would send his Spirit and that, somehow, we would be better for it. His Spirit would comfort us,

teach us, lead us into all truth, and help us. In despair, I prayed, “God, nothing is working for me. I need your Spirit to teach me how to think and control my thoughts. Will you help me? Will you teach me how to control my mind? I need you to do that for me, or it won't happen."

In that moment of depressed, defeated prayer, no sweeping deliverance took place, but a quiet and subtle shift happened within. At the time, I didn't comprehend how crucial and indelible that shift was or how it would lead to the salvation of my soul. I am not saying I was born again at that moment. The saving moment had happened three years prior, sitting in the high school parking lot in my car while surrendering my heart to Jesus.

The salvation of the soul refers to the restorative healing work of God in the depths of the human heart. It leads to the reformation of the soul. That slight shift graciously helped me to engage in

process. A process my heart has increasingly become more involved in over the years -- a process that continues to this day.

I had shifted from trying hard to surrendering. From holding on to letting go. From fighting to being vulnerable. From filling space to making room. From figuring it out to listening.

It was a shift to silence.

Silence. Not simply the absence of noise, though that can be helpful and necessary in our noisy culture. This silence is the posture of a soul listening to and waiting for God. This type of silence is perhaps best cultivated in the absence of noise, but once developed—it can be something we live from even amid the noise that is so difficult to escape.

Looking back now, I see how that slight shift began a foundational change within me, though in the moment it was difficult to conceive how my life would change. It started with listening for God's Spirit to teach me by making room for God's voice and seeing if he would say anything to me about my struggles. I waited in silence. Not passive silence but kind of like the silence employed when a smoke detector gives the low battery chirp, and walking around the house, you listen alertly for the next chirp to discover the culprit or perhaps confirm that you had misheard. I describe it today as beginning to lean in and listen for God internally.

It began by leaning in and listening while praying and reading Scripture for God to say something. In prayer, instead of just reciting routine words, I would ask, “Is there anything you want to tell me about what I am going through?" And I listened, paying attention to what was happening in my heart. In a fearful, anxious, terrified state, I would extend an empty hand to God and wait for him to fill it. To my surprise, things began happening in my heart as I listened. It was often so subtle and quiet that it was easy to second-guess whether it was God, but the resulting peace, strength, and confidence was undeniable.

There wasn't a discernible response every time I leaned in and listened, nor did the mental torment immediately dissipate. Still, it was as though oxygen began to seep into my gasping, choking soul, which was enough to keep me leaning in. It felt vulnerable- like doing a trust fall with God- that I couldn't force the voice of God to come to me simply by listening. Trying to make something happen felt like the exhausting exercise of quoting Scripture to make “bad” thoughts go away, something I was already familiar with. A surprising benefit of having shed the exhaustion of the battle I had been waging was its stark contrast to the rest that came to my soul as I waited in silence. This contrast shifted my approach from working from my own strength to receiving power from God. Any mental exhaustion signaled that I had reverted to the old way of fighting and that I needed reorientation to silence and rest.

What I received from God in silence was not grandiose or booming. Had that been the criteria, God's revelation would have been easy to overlook. Instead, something quiet and soft would rise through my heart and mind, giving me peace or strength in my soul. Renewed confidence and a sense that everything would be all right began replacing the panic and hopelessness that inhabited my soul. I could feel it intuitively and emotionally, but there would also be words or pictures that came to the ears and eyes of my heart. It would also come as I read Scripture with the same internal listening posture. Quietness and confidence came alive as I read, nourishing my soul. As these refreshing feelings came alive within, it dawned on me how much the rule of fear had parched my soul.

Fear had been behind the wheel of my soul for quite some time, but I had been unaware of it. I had been living under the assumption that the devil was attacking me strategically with thoughts that warranted violent, constant resistance, like some terrible Whac-A-Mole game. Experiencing God's peace and confidence in response to Scripture helped me realize how much fear had been interpreting Scripture for me.

In those early days of being formed in silence, I experienced the first vision I had been aware of, and it proved pivotal in God helping me control my mind. My previous understanding of a vision from God was something that could be seen with my physical eyes. My current understanding of visions is that they are seen primarily with the eyes of the heart or where we visualize things in the mind. You know that place: It's where we envision the cheeseburger we will order for lunch or replay the intense conversation we had with a coworker earlier in the day. The apostle Paul, in his letter to the church at Ephesus, prayed earnestly that the eyes of their hearts would be opened and flooded with light so that they could know the crucial things that were already true but that they weren't grasping or fully living out.

[I always pray] that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may grant you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation [that gives you a deep and personal and intimate insight] into the true knowledge of Him for we know the Father through the Son]. And [I pray] that the eyes of your heart [the very center and core of your being] may be en- lightened [flooded with light by the Holy Spirit], so that you will know and cherish the hope [the divine guarantee, the confident expectation] to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints (God's people), and [so that you will begin to know] what the immeasurable and unlimited and surpassing greatness of His [active, spiritual] power is in us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of His mighty strength.  - Eph. 1:17–19 Amplified Version

Paul wanted those believers to be transformed by experiencing something with their internal eyes to make connections and understand reality in a new way. I may have had a vision before this, but I just didn't recognize or pay much attention.

I had one vision while in a spiritual formation class in college. The professor gave us time to pray and journal. With my attention still focused on overcoming the problem that had plagued me for years, I quieted my heart, as I was learning to do, and asked the Lord to help me understand what was happening in my mind. From silence, a scene began to play out in my imagination—in that place in your head where you dream up scenarios or picture that cheeseburger. It had the quality of a daydream, except it came to me rather than me dreaming it up myself. The process required my full attention and participation. The option to ignore it, dismiss it, or choose to think about something else was possible. The vision was not overpowering.

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I saw myself standing alone in darkness and understood immediately that the scene represented my mind. Balls of light, the size of miniature basketballs, were flying past me on either side. Reaching out and grabbing hold of one, I interrogated it aggressively. In the next scene, the ball I had been questioning became like a rope and wrapped around me, tying me up. The scene reset, and I stood there again with the balls of light flying past, but this time I instead effortlessly batted them away to the side, allowing them to continue their journey past me. The scene changed again, and standing with my arms raised while looking straight up, a beam of light shone down on my face. Then the scenes finished.

This vision brought with it the awareness that whenever a thought went through my mind that I didn't think should be there, my instinct was to grab hold of it out of fear and question its presence, try to reason it away or worry about it intensely. The fearful response to the thought and the attention I gave to it was tying me up and causing me to become obsessed with making it go away, which only made it worse. I had thought my responses were reasonable and necessary spiritual warfare taking every thought captive! It had never occurred to me to consider an entirely different internal process. Instead of hypervigilantly fighting against every unwant- ed or scary thought, I could instead respond to it with an attitude of "whatever" and not exert effort toward it, and it would just pass.

Taking this posture enabled me to connect more powerfully with the thoughts of God coming to me, as represented by the light shining down on me. From silence, my heart opened in a new and transformative way. Instead of responding with fearful vigilance, I could be confidently nonchalant, which prevented me from get- ting tied up and instead kept me open to hearing God.

More than just understanding came with the vision: along with it came empowerment by God's grace to shift my ingrained internal process. Whenever God speaks to us, it is more than just words, pictures, or impressions. If we give ourselves to it, it is also power.

Though that vision gave me empowerment and wisdom, I was still uncertain whether it had really come from God. Could a vision from God truly be so ordinary, so simple, so unassuming? I explained to my professor what happened and asked, “Do you think that could have been from God? Was that a vision?" The professor wisely did not get too excited and pensively said with a shrug, “It could be.” I left thinking that perhaps I had heard from God but perhaps not, which is what hearing God feels like for me most of, if not all, the time.

People professing to hear God with 100 percent certainty without leaving room for their own fallibility make me skeptical and put me on guard. As with everything that genuinely comes from God, the fruit plays out over time. Fruit and time. If we connect with and hear from God, regardless of how booming or quiet a moment

and regardless of our certainty about it being him, if we pay attention to its effect and it produces good, enduring fruit in our lives, it was probably him.

When we think something is from God, it is best to surrender to it, walk it out, and pay attention to what it produces. This process must be done with honesty and humility so that we don't hold too tightly to what we think we are hearing, because it's always possi- ble that we're wrong. In the words of 38 Special, “Hold on loosely, but don't let go."

Slowly, my ascent from the pit began. As my familiarity with God's voice and leading grew in silence, I became aware of how he would speak to me outside of focused listening times. I became more familiar with what it felt like for God to talk to me or nudge internally. When interacting with people or listening to a speaker, I would be aware of him highlighting something for me.

One particular time near the end of my first year of Bible college, a student preacher shared a message that I do not have a single memory of except that he quoted Isaiah 30:15: “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength" (NKJV). The phrase "in quietness and confidence shall

be your strength" caught my attention and lifted my heart. Read- ing the verse repeatedly in my room later that evening, the concept of quietness and confidence began taking root and became vital to God rescuing me. With that verse, the Spirit led me through the Scriptures to see many others like it. The more I read, meditated, and heard God speak those things to my soul, the more quietness and confidence—which had eluded me for so long-became an internal reality.

Despite my growth, fear and depression continued to reach out to grab me. One such bout occurred on a summer mission trip to India between my first and second years of Bible college. A frustrated observer, I watched as my teammates poured compassion on the people of India we encountered who had such significant needs. I longed to join, but my brain was trapped in some stupid thought loop, and adding to the frustration was that I now knew I didn't need to be trapped in it!

Throwing myself on the hotel bed, I began praying fervently— and, to be honest, angrily. My volcanic intercession began to drown out the constant sound of hammering, honking cars, and warbling merchants filling the air outside. Slumping into a heap and opening my Bible with a long sigh, I randomly began reading John's Gospel. It was John 6, where Jesus tells a group of people who wanted to make him king that they are pursuing him for the wrong reasons. They are laboring for bread, but he points them to the Bread of Life that will satisfy more than their hunger—it will satiate their souls. Light began breaking into the dark of my struggle as it became apparent that Jesus himself would satisfy my soul. More than that, it was a revelation to me that more than just wanting me to be well-behaved, Jesus wanted me to have life- fully. Jesus wants us to be full of life, and he is the source.

This idea was like CPR for my soul. The burden of religious per- formance began to lift in the presence of God while reading Scrip- ture. Light began to shine on all the "try harder" tactics I had em- ployed to fix myself. Jesus wasn't just after our behavior; more important was that people were full of life. Jesus wanted me to be full of life in the here and now. Along the way, my mind had drawn up a caricature of God. The picture I had was that he want- ed us to mindlessly worship him and perfectly keep a high moral code as though the purpose of human life was to feed the divine ego while following the rules so as not to offend or disgust him. That caricature was behind much of my fear, and it was beginning to melt away as I spent time in silence with God. I was hearing and seeing God in a way I hadn't before. While my heart was passion- ate about Jesus, I began to fall in love with him.

Interestingly, weeks prior, I had prayed and asked God to show me whatever the apostle John knew that made him want to lean against Jesus so affectionately because my heart was not there. In India, the Gospel of John came alive, bringing a clearer picture of Jesus to my heart and expanding my capacity for love. That light more easily broke through due to the ongoing process of being formed in silence.

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Near the end of my two years in Bible college, I found myself in a completely different place from when all my trouble had started. Quietness and confidence were becoming the environment of my soul, and my picture of God was becoming clearer. The ability to focus on others rather than myself was blossoming. What had once consumed me and made me feel so hopeless was now be- coming manageable, with the knowledge of how to handle it more adaptively. Though God had done more than what I anticipated or hoped, it was only just the beginning. An even greater shift was on the way that would help me with exponentially more than just controlling my thoughts. A shift was coming that would take me beyond coping with my problem to setting me free.

Copyright © 2025 by Matt Schmuker