Chaplain Toolkit
Most chaplains are uncomfortable with silence.
Not because they don’t value it in theory. Because in practice, when a room goes quiet after a question or a statement, the instinct is to fill it — to add a word, a clarification, an example, something that relieves the discomfort of the pause. And almost every time that instinct is followed, the silence that was just beginning to do its work is interrupted before it finishes.
Read this passage slowly.
The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him.
Habakkuk 2:20 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
Let all the earth be silent before him. The silence commanded here is not passivity. It is the posture of a people in the presence of something that exceeds their capacity to respond immediately. The silence is the appropriate response to something significant. It is not absence — it is fullness of a kind that words would diminish.
Silence in a devotional works the same way. When a question lands in a room and produces quiet, something is happening in that quiet. The athletes are thinking. Some of them are feeling something they don’t yet have words for. Some of them are deciding whether to say something honest. The silence is the processing time, and filling it before the processing is done interrupts the most important part of the devotional.
The tactical use of silence requires the chaplain to distinguish between three different kinds of quiet: the productive silence of people processing something real, the uncomfortable silence of people who don’t understand the question and need a reframe, and the disengaged silence of a room that has checked out. The first kind should be held. The second should be addressed with a different entry point. The third should be diagnosed and responded to. Each requires a different response, and distinguishing between them is a skill that develops through practice.
Ask the question. Then wait. Count to ten silently if you have to. The answer that comes after ten seconds of silence is almost always better than the one that comes in two.
Ask the question. Then wait. The answer that arrives after ten seconds of silence is almost always better than the one that comes in two. The silence is the processing, not the gap.
In your last three devotionals, how often did you wait more than five seconds after a question before speaking again? What did you miss by filling the silence?
Self-reflective question about practice. The honest answer is usually: almost never, and probably a lot.
Hold the silence. It is doing more work than you think.
This devotional is for chaplain craft development. Consider following it with a practice exercise where chaplains deliver a short devotional and deliberately hold silence after the discussion question.