An Enlarged Heart in the Sound of Silence
Sometimes God doesn’t change your situation, because He is trying to change your heart, is a truth I have learned over time as I said to The LORD, “Show me my heart, LORD!”
The LORD has indeed taken me through many painful revelations in the fiery trials of purifying my heart.
How easily our hearts deceive us. We are so inclined to think more highly of ourselves than we ought. (Romans 12:3, Philippians 2:3)
We are definitely in a time of fiery trials and many delays that are affecting God’s people in many diverse ways, for each one of us has different gifts and calls.
God’s delays are testing our hearts as He is preparing us for the most unprecedented expansion of our Faith. Delay is never denial. It is only a stopping place for perfection.
I have cried so hard for the last three days that my eyes are still throbbing with pain and I have been on the computer very little.
I had been crying out to The LORD that I felt so isolated and alone, and my heart was hurting. I literally have been isolated for the last eight months and pretty much confined and away from interacting with people for the last eighteen months, during recovery from a bad fall. He has literally shut me down and drawn me into Himself.
As I was whining to The LORD, He said, “I have set you in the Wilderness for greater defining and refining of your assignment for the last days.
It has been a shaking and shaping process. I AM revealing the deep desires of My Flock and their hidden need for man’s opinion and man’s approval and praise.
My Word says that the fear of man brings a snare, but whosoever trusts in God shall be safe (Proverbs 29:25) for the fear of man is competing with the need for the Fear of God and causing many divided hearts,” said The LORD.
“You must know this one truth above all, “The Fear of God is the path to freedom and holiness.”
I say to you, there is a craving for the accolades of men that is taking the place of the deep hunger for My Heart,” says The LORD.
“My delay is starving out the self-centered mindset of man, that he might be hungry for a mighty move of his God.”
Suddenly I remembered something Billy Graham once said,
“You’re never more like the devil than when you want credit for what you do. For the praise of man is a snare.“
“The pandemic has caused many to be isolated, but it has also caused jealousy and envy to spread within the pandemic.
Have you not noticed the spirit of jealousy at work in the world?” says The LORD. “It is as cruel as the grave.
I AM drawing you into myself,” says The Father, “to enlarge your hearts. An enlarged heart is a heart for the world and it will produce tears,” says The Father to His disciples.
“An enlarged heart can be painful at times, because it will expand to embrace the depth of My Love in all of it’s Glory,” says The LORD to His Remnant Bride.
That morning after that wonderful time with The LORD, I turned on my computer and there was an article about the song, “Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel from back in the 1960’s.
As I listened to it, The LORD spoke to me. He said, “There is much isolation and fear in this time of darkness and there are many who are afraid to reach out or take a stand for truth.
They are hearing, but they are not listening. Fear has gripped their hearts and they have become silent.
There has been a distinct sound of silence, but know that the silence is being broken as many are stepping out with bold enlarged hearts to rescue the nations and be the light in the darkness,” says the one who is the LIGHT.
I could not stop crying and I listened over and over and over when I finally looked at the story behind the song, I was overwhelmed with the goodness of The LORD and how He used one man, Art Garfunkel, to bring light in the darkness of another man, his friend, Sanford.
Here is the song and the back story from © https://rockandrollgarage.com/.
May The LORD increase your vision for the power of ONE and may He enlarge your heart for the world in darkness.
Hello, darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a streetlamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
“Fools,” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you.”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence.”
©Simon Paul
“Art Garfunkel’s blind friend who inspired “Sound Of Silence” tells his story“
Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound Of Silence” is one of the best songs of all time and was inspired by Sanford “Sandy” Greenberg, Art Garfunkel roommate and best friend who lost his vision. Sanford released a moving new memoir named “Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: How Daring Dreams and Unyielding Friendship Turned One Man’s Blindness into an Extraordinary Vision for Life”. Having inspired the lyrics “Hello Darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again,” he said that Garfunkel helped him to recover his will to live again after the blindness.
“He lifted me out of the grave.” The 79 year-old man says that they met each other during their first week studying at the Columbia University in New York. “A young man wearing an Argyle sweater and corduroy pants and blond hair with a crew cut came over and said, ‘Hi, I’m Arthur Garfunkel’.”
“Every night Arthur and I would sing. He would play his guitar and I would be the DJ. The air was always filled with music. Still teenagers, they made a pact to always be there for each other in times of trouble. If one was in extremis, the other would come to his rescue,” he said. Some months later “I was at a baseball game and suddenly my eyes became cloudy and my vision became unhinged. Shortly after that darkness descended.” The doctors said it was conjunctivitis, assuring it would pass. However, days later Sandy went blind and they realized that glaucoma had destroyed his optic nerves. Sandy was from a Jewish immigrants in Buffalo, New York, son of a rag-and-bone man. They had no money to help him. So he had to quit college and gave up his dream of becoming a lawyer. In addition he plunged into depression. “I wouldn’t see anyone, I just refused to talk to anybody.”
And then unexpectedly Arthur flew in, saying he had to talk to me. He said, ‘You’re gonna come back, aren’t you?’ “I said,: ‘No. There’s no conceivable way.’ He was pretty insistent, and finally said, ‘Look, I don’t think you get it. I need you back there. That’s the pact we made together: we would be there for the other in times of crises. I will help you’.” Together with Garfunkel he returned to the university, where he became dependent on Garfunkel’s support. He would walk him to class, bandage his wounds when he fell. Also filled out his graduate school applications.
Garfunkel called himself “Darkness” in a show of empathy. The singer explained: “I was saying, ‘I want to be together where you are, in the black’. He would come in and say, ‘Darkness is going to read to you now. Then he would take me to class and back. He would take me around the city. He altered his entire life so that it would accommodate me.”
Art Garfunkel talked with his high-school friend Paul Simon about him, that used the story as one of the inspirations for writing the song. Art Garfunkel guided Sandy through New York one day. When they were in front of a vast forecourt of bustling Grand Central Station, Garfunkel said that he had to leave for an assignment. Then he abandoned his friend alone in the middle of the crowd. Terrified, he stumbled and fell. “I cut my forehead. I cut my shins. My socks were bloodied. I had my hands out and bumped into a woman’s breasts. It was a horrendous feeling of shame and humiliation. I started running forward, knocking over coffee cups and briefcases, and finally I got to the local train to Columbia University. It was the worst couple of hours in my life”, said Sandy. However, when he got back in the campus he bumped into a man that apologised:
“I knew that it was Arthur’s voice. For a moment I was enraged, and then I understood what happened: that his colossally insightful, brilliant yet wildly risky strategy had worked”. Garfunkel was with him all the time, watching his friend trying to go back to the university. “Arthur knew it was only when I could prove to myself I could do it that I would have real independence. And it worked, because after that I felt that I could do anything. That moment was the spark that caused me to live a completely different life, without fear, without doubt. For that I am tremendously grateful to my friend.”
Sandy graduated and went on to study for a master’s degree at Harvard and Oxford. While in Britain he received a phone call from his friend – and with it the chance to keep his side of their pact. Garfunkel wanted to drop out of architecture school and record his first album with Paul Simon, but explained: “I need $400 to get started.” Sandy, by then married to his high school girlfriend, says: “We had $404 in our current account. I said, ‘Arthur, you will have your cheque.’ “It was an instant reaction, because he had helped me restart my life. His request was the first time that I had been able to live up to my half of our solemn covenant.” The 1964 album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, was a critical and commercial flop. However, the track “The Sound Of Silence”, which was released as a single the following year, went to No 1 across the world. “The Sound Of Silence meant a lot, because it started out with the words ‘Hello darkness’ and this was Darkness singing. The guy who read to me after I returned to Columbia blind,” says Sandy. Simon & Garfunkel went off later with hits like Bridge Over Troubled Water and Mrs. Robinson.
Sandy carried on having extraordinary success as an inventor, entrepreneur, investor, presidential adviser and philanthropist. He is The Father of three, and launched a $3million prize to find a cure for blindness. He always refused to use a white cane or guide dog. “I don’t want to be ‘the blind guy. I wanted to be Sandy Greenberg, the human being.”
Him and Garfunkel remain best friends being credit by the musician as someone who changed his life. With Sandy, “my real life emerged. I became a better guy in my own eyes, and began to see who I was – somebody who gives to a friend. I blush to find myself within his dimension. My friend is the gold standard of decency,” Art Garfunkel said. “I am the luckiest man in the world,” Sandy stated.
May this story of one man laying down his life for his friend help you break the sound of silence in someone’s life with the beauty of an enlarged heart to carry out a covenant.”
©https://rockandrollgarage.com/.
~ Sandi Holman
Sandi Holman was called to the nations as an End-Time Handmaiden in 1984 with Gwen Shaw and served with YWAM Singapore and YWAM Charlotte in missions. Sword of The LORD Ministries came from a divine encounter with The LORD when He came into her prayer room and said, “I have come to put a sword in your hand and was given special instructions on how and when to use it.” She is an author, Prophetic Intercessor and Seer, Chaplain, Teacher, Speaker and Equipper, and Blogger who has also served as a Pastor Online with Beyond the Veil Ministries.
A paragraph excerpt from “The Saint Must Walk Alone” by A.W. Tozer:
The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as from the unregenerate world. His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, and his absorption in his love for Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share his inner experiences he is forced to walk alone.
Elisa, thanks so much for your engaging comment. Of course, I will pray for ITALY and you as well. Bless you! Sandi Holman
Inspiring, thank you Sandi. I too have been very isolated these last months with everyone taken away from me. Your post is greatly encouraging.
Thanks for the affirmation Mark. So many have gone through dark moments of silence in the darkness in the last couple of years. So happy you were encouraged with that heart warming story. Blessings, Sandi Holman
Thank you Sandi for the Father’s heart and yours in writing this!
Absolutely His divine favor is on you with your enlarged heart He has expanded in you!
Loved: “An enlarged heart can be painful at times, because it will expand to embrace the depth of My Love in all of it’s Glory,” says The LORD to His Remnant Bride.
The story of the ‘why’ behind the song I never knew. What selfless love and wisdom. Still weeping, it is so very beautiful!
I love you much. You are in my heart, thoughts and prayers. Joyce
Dear Joyce, I am forever grateful to be in your heart thoughts and prayers. Somehow I knew you would be moved by that selfless love story. What a good good father we have who is enlarging our hearts for the world. So much Love and prayers for you as well.Sandi xoxo
Dear Sandi,
Just like you this is the second period in my life where I have been isolated due to Spinal trauma and surgery. Both times I’ve been unable to even sit in a chair long enough to go to a church service or go out for lunch. This latest round started in 2019.
The Lord recently had me do a study on “Eagles”, with reference to the Word and analogies for our Christian walk. The nests of eagles are built in the wilderness away from mainstream society so that their babies can be safely raised without harm. Sometimes the Lord builds up His “Eagles” ( those who are strong , loyal ,true, who see from great height with supernatural eyes, strength and courage, soaring on the thermals of the Holy Spirit) in a wilderness type setting. For example Moses, 40 yrs in Midian, David 13-15 yrs in caves of wilderness before he became king, Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days . The wilderness is where we are slowly raised into our calling. God works everything for the good of those who love Him. The Lord is raising up His Eagles in this wilderness moment. Thank you for your encouraging article
Dear Sally, Thanks so much for your most encouraging words. You had no way to know the Lord has guided me for years by ‘eagles’ from the first day I answered His call to go to the nations. I would always know I was right where HE led me because there would be an eagle there somewhere..I loved ‘The wilderness is where we are slowly raised into our calling. God works everything for the good of those who love Him. The Lord is raising up His Eagles in this wilderness moment.’ I believe that is very true. I am finding myself now in the process of renewing my youth..lol! Ps 102. https://manastircelije.com/en/my-youth-is-renewed-like-the-eagles-psalm-102-verse-5/ Many blessings, Sandi
I didn’t know Garfunkle is still blind?
It is a Wonderful article. Thanks so much for sharing. It has put a smile on my heart today. Love your insight! Thank You, Father God, for your precious Saints.
Thanks for your comment, Susan. Garfunkle’s friend Sandy is the one who is blind. It brought many tears to me and made me so glad to see a heart of deep commitment to his word covenant..rare indeed today. Blessings, Sandi Holman
Thanks for sharing such a heartwarming story in a time that so many are to busy to help someone in needed, even if it is a word of encouragement or a smile. Trusting that you will breakthrough greater and quickly and your hearts desire will be abundant in the Lord and His goodness.
Thanks so much CHeryl, I am moving forward in my healing in every area..thanks be to God and all the prayers! I receive your encouraging word for HIS goodness and abundance. Bless your day, Sandi Holman
❤️Dear precious sister, I’m italian, please pray for Italy! Blessings
Wow! What a beautiful, moving story. Thank you.
Sharla, you are SO welcome. It continues to move my heart as I am still in intercession for those who are isolated with no one. Blessings, Sandi Holman