Threshold of Love
When silence is not absence, and love is still moving.
They say confession is good for the soul – I check the Website/Instagram/Facebook stats more than I probably should.
Not obsessively. Not with a spreadsheet and a colour-coded system and a prayer that ends with, please let the numbers go up. It is more ordinary than that. A quiet check on a Thursday morning before the day properly begins. A glance on the phone while waiting for the kettle. A few minutes in the evening when the house is still and I am wondering, in that vague and slightly uncomfortable way, whether any of this is being heard.
The thing is, when you write reflective pieces, there is rarely much visible feedback. Social media moves too quickly for something that is asking you to sit and think. Comment sections are largely silent. Replies, when they come, often come weeks later, tucked into an unrelated conversation.
So the stats become a kind of companion.
Some posts clearly do better than others. Some seem to reach people in particular ways – more views, more shares, more of that faint sign that something resonated. Others are quieter. And I notice that, because I am human, because I care about this work, because I want the words to matter.
But then something happens that reorders everything.
I will be on a Zoom call, or catching up with someone, or standing in the street, and someone will say, almost casually, “I really liked the blog about…”
And they will name something I wrote months ago.
And I will feel this small, surprised warmth – not only because they said something kind, though that is always welcome – but because it confirms something I had started to doubt.
The words are not disappearing into the ether.
People are reading.
Not maybe reading. Not theoretically reading. Actually reading. Carrying the words somewhere. Sitting with them during a commute, a walk, or some other time of the day. The feedback exists; it just does not always look like feedback. It lives in people’s lives more quietly than an algorithm can track.
The stats can tell me that something was opened. They can tell me that someone clicked. In some ways, they can suggest that someone stayed long enough to read to the end. But they cannot tell me what happened inside someone after that. They cannot tell me whether a sentence caught somewhere unexpectedly. Whether someone paused mid-paragraph and looked up from their phone. Whether a piece stayed with someone while they were washing up, driving, or lying awake at two in the morning wondering about something they cannot quite articulate.
The numbers are not meaningless. I do not think the answer is to pretend otherwise – to claim I am above them, to pretend I am indifferent would not be quite honest. They tell me something. They help me notice patterns. They remind me that some words seem to meet people in particular ways, and that is worth paying attention to.
But they are not the Master.
Numbers can guide, but they cannot define worth. They can show me the surface, but they cannot see what is happening underneath. And I have started to wonder whether some of the most significant things that happen as a result of writing are exactly the kind of things that leave no trace on any dashboard.
And I suspect this is not only true of writing.
Any time we offer something of ourselves and receive very little visible response, we can start to wonder whether it mattered at all. We can begin to measure the unseen by the little we are able to see.
A message not answered. A kindness not acknowledged. A prayer seemingly unanswered. A conversation that appeared to go nowhere. A piece of work that mattered to us more than it seemed to matter to anyone else.
And slowly, if we are not careful, silence starts to feel like absence.
But silence is not always absence.
I wonder how often I make that jump with God too.
I wonder how often I read his silence as absence. How often I check the spiritual dashboard and find it unhelpfully quiet, and conclude that nothing must be happening. That prayer is not being heard. That faithfulness is going nowhere. That if God is not producing visible movement, perhaps he has quietly withdrawn; perhaps he is less present than I had hoped; perhaps the room is empty after all.
There is something in me that wants reassurance. A sign. A sense of progress. Some confirmation that the whole enterprise of following him – even praying – is not simply an elaborate form of talking to myself.
And when those confirmations do not come in the forms I am looking for, I can start to treat silence as proof that God is not there.
Which brings me to Christmas.
I realise this is an odd place to go in the middle of the year. Easter has happened. Pentecost has happened. Pentecost did not even get a blog from me this year, and yet here I am, dragging us back towards a manger as though I have completely lost my grip on the calendar.
But stay with me. Because I think Christmas has something important to say about silence.
Christmas is the great threshold-crossing.
Before the birth of Jesus, from the human side of things, there had been centuries of waiting. Centuries of prayers that seemed to go nowhere in particular. Prophets who spoke into difficult silence. Generations who hoped for something they could not quite see the shape of. From the outside – from the dashboard view, if you like – it might easily have looked like absence. Like delay. Like a God who had perhaps moved on, or grown distant, or forgotten the address.
But Jesus reveals something extraordinary about that silence.
When he crossed the threshold into the world – when love entered the ordinary mess of a particular family, a particular night, a particular town that had no room – he did not arrive as proof that God had finally decided to become loving.
He arrived as the unveiling of the love that had been there all along.
The silence had not been absence. It had been hidden faithfulness. Love had been moving before anyone could measure it. Grace had been at work before anyone could name it. God had not been absent just because the room felt quiet.
And Jesus crossing that threshold does not mean God did his thing and then left us again with another long stretch of silence to navigate alone.
Easter and Pentecost do not replace Christmas as though God-with-us was only the opening scene before the real change arrived. They deepen it. They show us how far God-with-us is willing to go, and how near God-with-us intends to remain.
At Christmas, love crosses the threshold into the world.
At Easter, love walks through suffering, rejection, violence, death, and still does not leave.
At Pentecost, love is breathed into ordinary people, not as a memory to preserve but as a presence to carry.
So the question is no longer whether God has crossed the threshold towards us.
He has.
The question now is: will we cross the threshold towards him?
And I want to be careful here, because that question can so easily be heard as an obligation. As though crossing the threshold is something we achieve by trying harder. As though life with God is earned by spiritual effort, visible fruit, or the kind of faith that looks good from the outside.
But I do not mean it that way.
Crossing the threshold towards him is not about earning his nearness. He is already near. It is not about persuading him to care; he already cares, and he cared before we ever thought to ask. It is not about pretending we are whole when we know there are places in us that are exhausted, guarded, fractured, or afraid.
It is about allowing the love that has moved first to meet us truthfully.
This is not a movement of doing more.
It is a movement of being – a movement of grace in the heart.
It might look like prayer when prayer feels like sending letters to a silent house. It might look like listening when listening requires more stillness than the day seems to allow. It might look like telling the truth instead of performing. It might look like walking with him through the ordinariness of a life – the inbox, the washing up, the difficult conversation, the lunch break that doesn’t run long enough, the evening that runs too short – and learning to live as though his presence is true even when the signs are quiet.
Pentecost reminds me that the life of God does not stay safely contained.
The Spirit moves people outwards – into new languages, new courage, new roads, new rooms. The story widens. The edges of expansion become alive.
And perhaps that is where my imagination often goes first: to the movement, the road, the visible growth of the story.
But not every threshold looks dramatic from the outside.
Some thresholds are quieter: prayer when prayer feels empty, honesty when pretending would be easier, offering something without knowing what it will produce, returning again and again to the God whose love has already crossed the room.
I think about this often, especially in this season of trying to make A Curious Follower sustainable.
Because the temptation is obvious.
Count the views. Count the clicks. Count the books sold. Count the people in the room. Count the pennies – the pounds will look after themselves.
And to be honest, some of that counting matters. I cannot pretend it does not. If I am trying to build something that can keep going, then I need to know whether people are reading, whether spaces are gathering, whether books are selling, whether the work is connecting with actual real lives and not only with the hopeful, head-in-the-sand version of it.
But I also know there is a danger in letting the count become the truth.
Because the way of Jesus, keeps challenging my need for everything to be measurable before I can trust that it matters.
A conversation can matter. A room of three can matter. A sentence remembered months later can matter. A blog read quietly and never commented on can matter. A seed in the ground can matter long before anyone knows what it will become or if it even exists.
And maybe that is the threshold I keep finding myself standing at.
Not the threshold between caring and not caring.
I do care.
But the threshold between counting as a way of noticing, and counting as a way of proving.
So yes, I will probably keep looking at the stats.
I will keep learning from them. I will keep noticing what seems to resonate. I will keep paying attention to the signs of life that are visible.
But I do not want them to become Lord.
I do not want numbers to carry the weight of my worth as a writer, or as a person, or as someone trying to be faithful with what has been placed in my hands. Because every so often, someone says, “I really liked the blog about…” And I remember.
The words were not lost. The silence was not absence. The work was not meaningless just because it was quiet. Love had crossed the threshold in a way I could not measure at the time. And perhaps that is the invitation now.
To keep noticing without needing to control.
To keep counting without bowing down to the count.
To keep offering without demanding instant proof.
To keep turning towards the One who crossed the threshold first.
One more time. In the same direction. Towards him.
Josh | A Curious Follower
If these words crossed the threshold into your life in some small way, I would love you to keep walking with A Curious Follower.
You can do that by reading and subscribing here, sharing this reflection with someone who might need a reminder that silence is not always absence, picking up a copy of The Radical Recall to Rest, or getting in touch if you are curious about a reflective space for your team, church, or community.
In a season where I am learning the difference between counting as a way of noticing and counting as a way of proving, your reading, sharing, encouragement, and support really do matter.
Thank you for being here.
Josh Barker writes at acuriousfollower.com. His book The Radical Recall to Rest is available now.