NOISE

Answering machines, voicemail, cellphones, telephones, internet, blogs, e-mail, text messages, billboards, Television, radio. We have so many ways to say things in our culture and so many things that are said to us.

But nobody's really saying anything worth listening to.

You ever thought about it? Think about all the chatter on the news about politics right now. Nobody is really saying anything. Yet we continue to listen to the noise because the noise is better than silence, I suppose.

Life is loud in 2008. We all have our volume levels cranked. Our ipods are dialed up. We are infusing our audible sense with so much clutter.

Podcasts, speeches, sermons, music, news, talk-radio. We like to talk so much that we even like to listen to people talk.

If our ears were feet, we'd walk 1,000 miles every day with how much we listen to.

Why does silence threaten us? By the way we live, we never give room to it...silence, that is. We don't want any quietness to invade any facet of our lives. Why many people even go to sleep with Mp3 players so they can let their beautiful noise lull them into sleep.

Noise. It is comforting. Loud, but comforting.

I wonder what would happen if we powered off our cell phone for 10 minutes and then pulled out our ear buds and turned off our ipod? And then maybe even turn off the TV and closed our laptop screen? I wonder what would happen if for just 10 minutes we decided to sit in silence and not hear anything but our own breathing?

How long has it been since you did that? Listen to your own breath? Have you ever laid on a pillow in such a way that you could even hear your own heartbeat?

What if in that kind of quietness you whispered these words...

"God, help me to not live so loudly."

Maybe God has been trying to speak to you but you can't hear him because you've been living with so much noise. God is a whisperer. He gave up thundering down to us long ago. He wants us to be so quiet, so rested, so...still...that we can hear Him whisper to us.

I think a 10 minute respite from all the clutter of the noise would do just about all of us some good. I get tired of it all, honestly.

I remember once, several years back, when I was all worked up about the amount of time I had been spending watching TV (that particular issue hasn't convicted me recently though) so much time watching just garbage. So I decided to issue a challenge through an impassioned sermon to join me in a 2 week fast from TV.

And to solidify the decision I even sent around a clipboard with a sign-up on it. When the service was over and I went to the back of the church building to get the clip board, I found on the clip board my name and the name of my pianist.

So our life changing crusade affected me and her. (And I don't even think I made it two weeks anyway!)

We are so scared of silence. I don't quite know why other than in silence is when we actually do hear. We hear the thoughts that the noise seems to keep at bay. We hear the actions and conversations that we have managed with all the help of the noise to stuff. And we don't want to hear that.

So we swim in the sounds. We bathe ourselves in it.

What a minute? Did you hear something? Oh, it was probably nothing. So what new songs have you got on your ipod?