Hello to my family and friends. Welcome to the Bridgetown Daily for Monday, April 27th. I'm John

Mark Comer and I am really starting to miss you all. I'm not gonna lie. After church yesterday,

I was sad, which in all honesty was unexpected. It was a beautiful spring day with no rain. I am

training for the Portland Marathon in October. That will likely get canceled, but hey, I'm turning 40. I

made a pact years ago to run a marathon for my 40th birthday. So either way, rain or shine, official or

me in Forest Park, I am running 26.2 miles. And normally an 11 mile run around the waterfront on a

sunny day with my afternoon free to study and work on my teaching for the week ahead. That is just

like introvert pastor dream, but I'm not gonna lie. I was just really missing you. And I'm counting the

days until we're all back together again. But one thing that I am also loving about the stay home

order and the season that we are in as a church is all the quiet. Now again, I know I'm an introvert,

but it's just bear with me. I got up early Sunday morning before church and I was just struck again

by how quiet our city is right now. No airplane noise overhead, no traffic, no concert or music. I

hear the birds now more than ever. And quiet is more than just a personal value for introverted

parents like myself. In the way of Jesus, quiet is a kind of spiritual discipline in and of itself.

And when we teach on the practice of quiet or what has come to be called silence and solitude,

which is all over the life of Jesus, we talk about two dimensions of quiet, external and internal.

External is when you silence all of the noise outside of you. You turn off the TV, you take your

air pods out of your ears, you close the door or get out of the city and you just set your brain

before God without the non-stop stimuli of the modern world. What Cardinal Roberts in his

stunning book, The Power of Quiet, calls a dictatorship of noise. An external quiet is for the most

part a matter of logistics. You get out of town, you put it on the schedule, you go hiking or you get

up early before your kids or your spouse takes the kids on a walk for 30 or an hour and then you flip

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