Silence and Solitude have been familiar companions in my life for almost as long as I can remember. I’m introverted by nature, and through both habit and nature, am very comfortable being left alone with my thoughts for long periods.

The first time I attended Axiom, it was in 2019, about a year after I moved to Hoboken, and before I had (mostly) adjusted to the level of noise and busyness of this area. I saw that Hoboken Grace offered a weekend retreat to teach silence and solitude as spiritual practices, and I jumped at the chance to attend.

I wanted to go, more because I missed nature and quietness than from feeling any particular need to grow in those areas. Truthfully, I didn’t expect to learn anything particularly new, as both silence and solitude were (I thought) daily fixtures in my life. What I expected and wanted was a quiet weekend in the woods somewhere, away from car horns and people rushing from one appointment to another- restful, a nice reset after a busy season. What I got WAS those things, but also so much more.

First and foremost, it was difficult.

I am comfortable being alone. I have accidentally gone days without actually talking to another person, I regularly spend hours by myself, daily and I get burnt out and exhausted when I don’t get that time alone. Even with all of that training on my side, it was hard to practice silence intentionally. I’ll be honest, the solitude part was still easy for me, but intentional silence, internal not external, was incredibly difficult. My mind is always going; telling stories, mulling over interesting or hurtful things, imaginary arguments, it’s a stream that never stops. Even my prayers are a running dialogue, and learning to quiet those thoughts and to just be present with God was one of the hardest things I’d ever done; frustrating and exhausting, like exercising a muscle I didn’t even know I had, let alone used.

It was also frustrating because though I wrestled that whole weekend to quiet my thoughts so that I could hear from God, what I heard from Him was a whole lot of silence. This, too, is something I am not unfamiliar with, but to experience silence from Him on a weekend where I thought He was going to have something for me felt almost like a rejection, or like I hadn’t done enough. I expected to hear from Him in those moments of quiet, and it hurt when I didn’t.

Thankfully, the weekend did not end there, and while I did not hear something in the moments I was practicing silence, I heard from Him in the community of people on the retreat with me. I heard from Him in the beauty of the nature around me. I heard His words, written in the Bible. Not in a tailored message or any particular statement, just that He was there with me, and that even in the silence, I wasn’t alone. It was sweet, it was exhausting, and it planted seeds that I would carry with me into the next season of my life.

The community built there is not something I expected in the least, but it was one of the sweetest gifts, and a big reason why I’m drawn back again and again. For a retreat that is ostensibly about silence and solitude, there is also a deliberate building of community, and it is such a joy and so humbling to see people being able to lean into vulnerability and to share what they are going through and where they are in their relationship with God. It is beautiful to see how God speaks to us through the people around us, and this weekend is a clear picture of that for me.

The second I attended Axiom Homecoming, in 2023, I was in a very different place mentally. I was in the middle—or the tail end, depending on how you look at it—of a very difficult season in my life. I was still processing everything that happened in 2020, as well as other earlier events (worsening anxiety, a pretty substantial chronic illness) in my life that had been exacerbated by the pandemic. I was looking forward to Axiom for the good parts of what I remembered from the first time, but I was also very anxious about the parts that had been hard. I was feeling a distance between myself and God, and desperately wanted to close it, but was worried that through this, the distance would be felt more acutely. I knew that the distance I was feeling was my own doing, and expected to feel a lot of guilt and shame and remorse over the weekend, because that had been my experience the last few years whenever I thought about my time with God. My wish was that this time, the guilt would be enough to pull me through and push me to do better in my walk with God. It’s been a few years now since that weekend, and my overwhelming memory from that time is love.

Instead of the guilt or shame I was dreading, it felt like from every corner and direction, from the friends around me, to the wind in the trees, a fox by the brook, and a surprisingly beautiful moth on a wall, God was reminding me how loved I was. How precious He found me, how His patience was infinite, and His grace was deeper than my guilt or my shame. Instead of doubling down and telling me to do better and be better, God responded by reminding me what He wanted was for me to just be with Him. I pray that these lessons stay with me my whole life, and I can’t wait to see what He has in store for this year’s Axiom.