Silence is rarely an atmosphere I seek out purposefully.
Silence instead is usually a consequence of forgetting my ipod at home when I’m out for a ride in my car, not having cable or internet access readily available when I’m away from home for the night… or even worse, when I forget my cell phone or it loses its charge… I text message a ridiculous amount on a daily basis.
I spend a good majority of my day escaping silence, surrounding myself with noise.
Honestly, I can’t remember my life before it was this way… perhaps these are just examples of the noises I use now as distractions… but maybe in my past I used different activities and things to create noise and avoid silence.
Do you do this? What is your distraction? How do you escape silence?
For whatever reason, silence causes me to be anxious… perhaps, if we’re honest, we all can say that we feel the same way or at least similar.
But what is so frightening about silence? Why is it that some of us, including me, are afraid of being alone with our thoughts… being separated from our distractions and concentrating on what is actually happening in our life…
There have been times in my life where I have, against my own will, been forced into silence.
Nearly two years ago I moved to Nashville, TN for graduate school. During my first several months in Nashville, I never felt more alone. My relationship with my family and friends back home were under great tension because of a faith crisis I was openly enduring, I had recently broken up with my girlfriend and best friend of nearly two years only two months before, and I had moved into a small 8 x 8 dorm room alone where I would spend the next year of my life away from everyone I was close to and loved.
I was utterly alone and in my aloneness there was the starkest silence I had ever experienced.
For several months I would wake up to an empty room, check my messages only to find zero, I would walk nearly a mile to class for a few short hours a day and then return back to my dorm room… and again be trapped by the silence.
At first I fought against it… I felt so anxious I could hardly even sleep and most nights I remained up until 4 or 5 in the morning attempting to find ways to keep myself busy where I wouldn’t have to think about all the things that were going on in my life.
It was just too painful.
Over time I became more accustomed to the silence and it no longer felt so uncomfortable. It took several months of anxiety before I made a commitment to myself to stop fighting and to spend time in silence, purposefully, each day.
For a year, I made the commitment to no longer drive my car when I could walk. To read a book instead of watching a movie, playing a video game, or turning on my TV, and to walk or run at least a mile around campus each day without my ipod so that I could pray or just have time to think.
During that time I never felt more connected to God and more aware of myself and my own personal needs. Before that I time, I had always surrounded myself with so much noise that I rarely took the time to be aware of who I truly am or how I felt about the world around me.
Instead of having my own original thoughts, I was constantly looking through the lens of the lyrics of my favorite music, the words of my favorite authors, or the images presented in my favorite films… I rarely took time to get to know myself in silence… to think for myself and to voice those thoughts with my friends and family.
Please do not misunderstand me… I love music, movies, books, watching TV, text messaging, talking on my phone… you name it… all of these things are good but can also be abused.
At what point do these things stop becoming conveniences and instead become distractions from self awareness and knowing who we are as human beings.
How much of our life is filled with unnecessary noise simply because we are afraid of the power of silence to reveal a more true image of who we are in our current state?
Are we afraid of knowing ourselves because we would surely fall short of who we image ourselves to be?
There is a passage in the Hebrew scriptures found in the book of Hosea, the third chapter where God is speaking to the prophet Hosea of His plan to bring the nation of Israel back to Himself.
God says, “I will win her back once again. I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her there. I will return her vineyards to her and transform the Valley of Trouble into a gateway of hope. She will give herself to me there, as she did long ago when she was young, when I freed her from her captivity in Egyppt.”
Perhaps this passage can reveal to us God’s heart to draw His people, to draw us, into a place of silence… to bring us out of the noise of our daily lives… to quiet the distractions…
And in that place, perhaps this is where we can truly connect to God… to hear His voice as He tenderly speaks to us… away from the noise of the world.
Perhaps this is where we begin to understand ourselves, who we truly are… perhaps this is where we find purpose for living… even amidst a noisy and painful world.
God’s Peace.
Josh
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Creation: God's Microphone
Silence is golden until you want to say something. This is a typical feeling for me in the middle of a van with three children and two adults. The three children are usually lobbying for opportunities to say stuff so that they can be heard and the two adults are almost as often trying to quiet them down, so that they can enjoy their own conversation with each other. Silence is more appreciated than it used to be, but it is still an endangered pastime in my world. Part of the reason for this, as Sam mentioned on Sunday evening in his sermon and Josh alluded to in his blog, is that we don’t want to hear; we only want to be hear
d. And thus this is the issue in our world: our brokenness causes us to create unnecessary noise that drowns out God’s voice to us through his creation.
This is why we are periodically astounded by the interruption of the noise by random changes in our life. For example, when we moved to the Gulf Coast fourteen months ago from Atlanta, one of the first things we noticed was extraordinary about this area was that we were able to see a myriad of stars at night. This never occurred to us as a problem in Atlanta, because we were so near the smog and pollution of the city that our inability to see or hear was blind (or deaf to continue our analogy) to us. In fact, the noise pollution itself was noticeably absent from our new atmosphere, since we were used to hearing planes circle the air 24/7 at the world’s busiest airport right up the road. This newfound discovery, however, of our atmosphere was at first breathtaking. It was not like we had never seen a star before, but rather that it had been a while since we had noticed.
No wonder the Psalmist writes in the Nineteenth Psalm: “The Heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.” (Psalm 19:1-4) It is almost as if God is trying to say something to us through his creation. The creation is one of the media by which he communicates with humanity about his glory. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans with regards to this and puts it this way: “For what can be known about God is plain to those who suppress the truth (my paraphrase), because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
With reference to our discussion, I think what Paul is saying is that God is plainly communicating to us some measure of his glory, but some of us are failing to hear him, i.e. we are “suppressing the truth”. More importantly, it means that we are willingly tuning him out. What is not to be missed about this, though, is the fact that those in this passage turn away from the one creating to the creation itself. The creation points to something greater, but how we listen to the creation indicates our esteem for the Creator. The fact that we listen at all says that we are in tune to the world around us and are therefore in tune with God. The whole creation is crying out (groaning together in the pains of childbirth) in many respects and I think this reflects its brokenness, but also its longing for God’s glory to free it from its decay. This decay is seen in various ways through various ecological crises, global warming, poverty and famine, slavery, and other human suffering.
So, for us, it is challenging to be reminded that our noises of apathy, busyness, and self-absorption drown out creation’s beauty as well as its deepest needs. The other night I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep at about 1 AM and I heard this scratching sound against the door of our garage. So, I got up and went to go check on things and I discovered that our cat Fluffy was not just scratching the door frantically, but he was moving around like he had gone insane. Then I quickly realized that he had no food or water, because apparently my oldest daughter had forgotten to feed him. So, I fed him and I watched him eat for a few moments, and then I started to go, and he started to act frantic again (as most animals do when I leave their presence), so I took a few more moments and realized that more than resources he needed my attention. And this otherwise frustrating moment of noise had brought me to the silence of stopping what I wanted to do for what God’s creation was trying to tell me. And for a few moments it was nice to enjoy my cat, and I was reminded of that scripture that says, “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast”, not so I could revel in my righteousness, but be reminded that God speaks in the minutiae of his creation if we take the time to turn down the volume of our life. If we do, we might just hear the glory of God in our pet, in a beautiful sunset, in stars we didn’t know were there, or perhaps in a group of birds or flowers Jesus told us to observe.
posted by Jason G
d. And thus this is the issue in our world: our brokenness causes us to create unnecessary noise that drowns out God’s voice to us through his creation.
This is why we are periodically astounded by the interruption of the noise by random changes in our life. For example, when we moved to the Gulf Coast fourteen months ago from Atlanta, one of the first things we noticed was extraordinary about this area was that we were able to see a myriad of stars at night. This never occurred to us as a problem in Atlanta, because we were so near the smog and pollution of the city that our inability to see or hear was blind (or deaf to continue our analogy) to us. In fact, the noise pollution itself was noticeably absent from our new atmosphere, since we were used to hearing planes circle the air 24/7 at the world’s busiest airport right up the road. This newfound discovery, however, of our atmosphere was at first breathtaking. It was not like we had never seen a star before, but rather that it had been a while since we had noticed.
No wonder the Psalmist writes in the Nineteenth Psalm: “The Heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.” (Psalm 19:1-4) It is almost as if God is trying to say something to us through his creation. The creation is one of the media by which he communicates with humanity about his glory. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans with regards to this and puts it this way: “For what can be known about God is plain to those who suppress the truth (my paraphrase), because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
With reference to our discussion, I think what Paul is saying is that God is plainly communicating to us some measure of his glory, but some of us are failing to hear him, i.e. we are “suppressing the truth”. More importantly, it means that we are willingly tuning him out. What is not to be missed about this, though, is the fact that those in this passage turn away from the one creating to the creation itself. The creation points to something greater, but how we listen to the creation indicates our esteem for the Creator. The fact that we listen at all says that we are in tune to the world around us and are therefore in tune with God. The whole creation is crying out (groaning together in the pains of childbirth) in many respects and I think this reflects its brokenness, but also its longing for God’s glory to free it from its decay. This decay is seen in various ways through various ecological crises, global warming, poverty and famine, slavery, and other human suffering.
So, for us, it is challenging to be reminded that our noises of apathy, busyness, and self-absorption drown out creation’s beauty as well as its deepest needs. The other night I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep at about 1 AM and I heard this scratching sound against the door of our garage. So, I got up and went to go check on things and I discovered that our cat Fluffy was not just scratching the door frantically, but he was moving around like he had gone insane. Then I quickly realized that he had no food or water, because apparently my oldest daughter had forgotten to feed him. So, I fed him and I watched him eat for a few moments, and then I started to go, and he started to act frantic again (as most animals do when I leave their presence), so I took a few more moments and realized that more than resources he needed my attention. And this otherwise frustrating moment of noise had brought me to the silence of stopping what I wanted to do for what God’s creation was trying to tell me. And for a few moments it was nice to enjoy my cat, and I was reminded of that scripture that says, “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast”, not so I could revel in my righteousness, but be reminded that God speaks in the minutiae of his creation if we take the time to turn down the volume of our life. If we do, we might just hear the glory of God in our pet, in a beautiful sunset, in stars we didn’t know were there, or perhaps in a group of birds or flowers Jesus told us to observe.
posted by Jason G
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