The Roar at the Edge of Niagara

When Sarah Chen stood at the railing of Horseshoe Falls for the first time, she did something no one expected. She wept.

It wasn't fear — though 750,000 gallons of water plunging 167 feet every second is terrifying enough. It wasn't the mist soaking through her jacket or the way the iron railing trembled beneath her grip. It was the sound. A roar so total, so all-encompassing, that it swallowed every other noise — the tourists chattering in a dozen languages, the wind off Lake Ontario, her own racing thoughts. For a woman who had spent three years drowning in anxiety, who couldn't quiet the voices in her head even with medication and therapy and white-noise apps, that roar became the first real silence she had known in years.

"It was so loud," she told her pastor afterward, "that it was finally quiet inside me."

David understood this. In Psalm 29, the voice of the LORD thunders over the waters, splinters the cedars of Lebanon, shakes the wilderness of Kadesh, strips the forests bare. Seven times the psalmist names that voice — not to frighten us, but to remind us there is a sound greater than every noise competing for our attention. And the psalm ends not with terror but with blessing: "The LORD gives strength to His people; the LORD blesses His people with peace."

Sometimes we need a voice so immense it drowns out everything else — and in that holy overwhelm, we finally find rest.