The theme of today's talk is a quiet heart.

And this is something that the Lord has been opening to me for some time, the need for a quiet heart.

How can we find it? How can we quiet our hearts before God? I had been thinking and praying about this matter

for a long time before a memory suddenly clicked in my mind that I had completely forgotten.

One day back in 1948, when I was a college student at Wheaton, a friend named Sarah Spiro and I were messing around

on the piano, as we often did in the dormitory lounge. Sarah was a great pianist, and I gave

her four little lines that had just come to me, and she set them to music. These were the four

lines. Lord, give me a quiet heart that does not ask to understand,

but confident steps forward in the darkness guided by thy hand. And when that memory came to me,

I realized that I had been praying that ever since I was 21 years old. God

really had, it has been answering that prayer. I think he began answering way back when I began to pray

those words. But he doesn't do things necessarily on our time schedule, does he?

Very often, it is what seems to us a very slow process.

And probably the reason is that we are what Jesus said, fools, and slow of heart to believe.

I have a strong hunch that there are many of you today who are really longing for quietness

in your lives.

There isn't very much of that in the world today, is there?

It's very difficult to escape noise.

You get in an elevator and you've got noise. You walk down in a quiet, a very quiet town in Magnolia.

Incidentally, my husband and I don't live actually in Boston. We live 30 miles north of Boston in a very quiet, tiny little town called Magnolia.

And you find that somebody is painting a house, his truck will be a 100 yards away, and he's got the stereo blasting the entire neighborhood.

So there are chainsaws and helicopters and traffic and the noise of people and so-called noise of music nowadays, which unfortunately does seem to be, to me, to be mostly noise.

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