Bill Hendricks was the planned speaker on September 13, 2026.

A few weeks ago, someone asked me what Meeting was like.
I thought about it for a moment, and I said, “Well, it was a good conversation.”
I’ve been thinking about that answer ever since.
It led me back to the story of Elijah at Mount Horeb, in the nineteenth chapter of First
Kings.
Elijah is told to stand on the mountain before God. There comes a great wind, strong
enough to break rocks. But the text tells us that God was not in the wind.
Then there is an earthquake. But God was not in the earthquake.
Then there is a fire. But God was not in the fire.
And after the fire comes what one translation calls “a still small voice,” and another calls
“a sound of sheer silence.”
I’ve always been drawn to that passage. But lately I’ve found myself disagreeing with
part of it.
I was taught as a little boy that God is everywhere. God is in everything.
And as a Quaker, I believe in continuing revelation. God did not stop speaking
thousands of years ago. The Spirit continues to speak to us.
So I find myself asking: Why wasn’t God in the wind?
Why wasn’t God in the earthquake?
Why wasn’t God in the fire?
I think God was.
And if I believe that, then I cannot negate the wind, the earthquake, or the fire and say
that only the silence matters.
Sometimes there is fire in us. There is passion. There is something that says, “This
matters. I need to speak.”
Sometimes there is wind. Ideas and arguments are moving around us. Other people are
speaking. We’re trying to understand one another.
And sometimes there is an earthquake. Something shakes what we thought we knew.
We become uncomfortable. We aren’t quite as certain as we were when the
conversation began.
I don’t think those things are necessarily distractions from God.
God may be there, too.
But then comes the sheer silence.
And perhaps that is the culmination.
Not because God wasn’t present in everything that came before it. Not because the fire
was wrong, or the wind was meaningless, or the earthquake should be ignored.
The silence gives us a place to listen to what all of it has revealed.
That brings me back to my answer about Meeting: “It was a good conversation.”
Maybe that’s part of what we are doing together.
We bring our fire. We bring our convictions and our passions.
We bring the wind—our questions, our disagreements, our different experiences.
Sometimes we even bring the earthquake. Something somebody says shakes us.
And then, as Friends, we return to silence.
Not necessarily to make all those things disappear.
We return to silence to listen.
And perhaps the difficult part of discernment is knowing when to speak from the fire and
when to wait.

When is that passion something I am being led to share?
When is the voice I hear simply my own certainty?
And when does sitting with it in silence change what I need to say—or change how I
need to say it?
I don’t have an answer to that.
Maybe that’s why this passage stays with me.
I don’t think the still small voice asks us to extinguish the fire.
Perhaps we carry the fire with us.
We carry the wind.
We carry the earthquake.
All of them may have something to tell us. All of them may be part of continuing
revelation.
But eventually, we come to the sheer silence.
We began this morning with the hymn, “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
For the next thirty minutes, we don’t have to answer that question.
We can simply listen.
And enter the sheer silence together.