Being quiet is a little bit close to impossible for me. However, my senior year, when my head was bigger than it should have been and I was sure I had every answer, God quieted me.
Just before college auditions, I found I had pushed my voice too far. Between leading a marching band, non-stop practicing for auditions and scholarships, and the heavy stress I was packing on myself, my voice broke. 
I developed two extremely large callouses called nodes on my vocal folds. This impeded their ability to vibrate and make healthy sound. Not only did I loose my singing, but soon my speaking voice was gone too. 
I was devastated. How would I follow my passion of music making? How would I interview for scholarships? How would I give my Salutatorian speech? Why was God sabotaging everything I had worked for?
It was because He was not in it. I had hacked away at the world on my own, determinedly making decisions letting nothing stand in my way. I asked for the will of God as a formality, with very little intention of going any but my own way. Now I was helpless. 
In one single moment, sitting in a scary chair in a sterile office, a doctor told me all my work could be worth nothing now. There is nothing more powerful than the realization that EVERYTHING is now in the hands of God. 
Never have I pleaded with, sobbed to, scolded, and reckoned with my God such as I did those first few weeks. I was broken, I never had been before.
But here is where the sun comes out. I decided I wanted to trust Him. I wanted to walk blindly and trust freely, so I did. I was silent, utterly silent, for two weeks. Silent at school, silent at church, silent at dinner, always such loud quiet. 
I found a person in me that I did not know, I found a desire for Jesus and an inner power welling from the Spirit. I found the truth of all the things I believed could only be fully known in the quiet and the honest.
My Great and Mighty God restored my voice in two months. An impossibility. I auditioned and got a scholarship, a big one. I gave speech, and I laughed out loud again. 
Now, I really use this voice. I value this voice. I raise it is solemn prayer and I raise it in abandoned praise. I will proclaim the goodness of my Jesus and the adoration of my God. Friends, I promise you, miracles happen. They happen daily, and often quietly. Praise God, for you are faithful. I am forever yours.
“Every step we are breathing in Your grace
Evermore we’ll be breathing out Your praise
You are faithful, God, You are faithful” – Never One, Matt Redman

The first day that winter breaks on the back of spring and the daffodils push through the frozen dirt is the most beautiful thing. It is the brightness that makes us throw off our coats and put on shorts that will leave us chilly all day, but we will ignore. It calls the most reclusive out of their dorms and there is laughter and sunglasses and goosebumps and hope.
College is the most wonderful on these days, when we are all happy to be just where we are. Today, sitting in a pack of smiling young adults who had decided to be kids again, life froze. My heart seized in the most unexpected panic because I suddenly saw the inertia of it all.
Tomorrow I will schedule classes for my junior year of college, the brightest time of my life so far. The memories, fulfillment, and friendships I have found here have redefined me. Yesterday, it seems I was a blinking brave freshman, ready to build and create a life.
Now, so much has happened, so much has changed. Nearly all for the better, but all too fast. The barreling of time, and the coming end of my “discovery period” is terrifying.
Having a moment in which you can see the utter smallness of time, and the grandness of your God is shaking. Surely this must go on, and instead of college being the discovery time of life, what if life is the discovery period of eternity.
Instead of focusing on building a future for my lifetime, I pray I can make a change for the kingdom. May the small and momentary space I take on this Earth, make me proud in my eternity elsewhere.
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!” Isaiah 6:8