Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Monday Meditations. I've really been praying over the past week

over what word that we should be meditating on this week. And God placed on my heart the word solitude.

So many of us are afraid to be alone. And I get it. We equate it with loneliness. We avoid it because

silence is where our thoughts can sometimes be the loudest, and our minds

are where the enemy often tries to battle the hardest. But there's a big difference between being

alone and seeking out spiritual solitude. Biblical solitude is the practice of eliminating distractions

and temporarily withdrawing to privacy for spiritual purposes.

And it's a time of minutes, hours, or even days spent without the presence of people in order

to engage in spiritual disciplines like meditation and prayer. And throughout scripture,

we read of God appearing to people in quiet places of solitude, giving

leaders visions, or even speaking audibly.

There are examples in the desert, the wilderness, the hills, all the way from Moses to Paul

and Jesus.

And there are examples of people seeking God in mourning, desperation, anxiety, fear, and

a need for wisdom, great beauty, insight, fear, and a need for wisdom.

Great beauty, insight, peace, and divine inspiration are found by spending time alone with God.

There is so much mental and physical noise surrounding us that our schedules are packed to the brim.

And in the background of our days are the incessant pinging sounds from our phones and computers,

from emails and texts and social media notifications.

It doesn't stop.

And most of us have little margin for our brain, our soul, our spirit to just be alone, to just be quiet,

to give ourselves a second to breathe without distraction and other people vying for our attention.

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