Lately I have been listening to a lot of jazz music while working or on the road. I have loved jazz since I was a teenager, but I was never one to know every artist or style. I listen to enjoy. I listen when I want to relax or get lost in the moment.

A thought came to me. I wanted to write about jazz and Lent. Is it “jam and Jesus”? Clever—but shallow.

So I sat with the question a little longer.

What is it about jazz that feels right for this season?

It’s not the complexity. It’s not even the melody.

It’s the space—and the discipline required to play music that sounds unstructured. The pauses. The restraint. The moments where nothing seems to be happening, and yet there is an order beneath what sounds like chaos. Something is quietly forming underneath.

If you have a music player now, try one song—maybe from Earl Klugh or George Benson. You will hear it. The pause is where the musicality happens, and the disordered notes held together by an unseen order.

Like jazz, Lent calls us to pause and reflect. And in that pause, we begin to notice something deeper. Not control in the way we define it, but a quiet order that holds even the chaos of our lives.

A beginner musicians tries to fill every second with sound, thinking that music is made by constant noise. But real music—like life—emerges in the pauses and in finding order in chaos.

And perhaps that is what I am slowly learning this Lent: not to fill every moment, but to trust the silence, where God is already at work.