White Noise

 

“Be still and know that I am God.”

—Psalm 46:10

You have probably experienced the same thing as I have. I stop at a red light, wrapped in reverie in my mind, when a black car with darkened windows pulls up beside me and my ears are assailed by a very loud, driving beat that fairly bounces off the pavement and makes my car shake. I wonder to myself, “Has this person ever heard the sheer beauty in music?”

We live in such a noisy world. And, like white noise, we hardly notice it. We tend to fill the silence with music in the car, with the TV at home, and sometimes with music while we work. Some people really suffer withdrawal and discomfort when absolute quiet lasts too long.

While I taught music to children for 40 years, I taught listening, as well. A motto I had during those years said, “Beautiful music begins with a beautiful silence.”

Children frequently come to music class singing without listening, which results in making sound without any reference to the pitch of the song the class is singing, to the teacher, or to the piano. These children have to learn to listen in order to match the pitch in the room. For some that seems very difficult.

We Christians have trouble listening in quiet so that we can hear what God wants us to hear. On a purely earthly level, we miss the sounds of nature around us: the birds in the trees, the waves on the beach, or the rustling of the leaves in the breeze. How can we fully appreciate the Creator without listening to the sounds He has created? We simply need more quality time in utter silence.

On a more spiritual level, we must listen, as 1 Kings 19:12 KJV says, for the “still small voice” of God. Not only do we need to have silence from earthly noise, we need stillness in our person and in our thinking, so that we can listen to what God is saying.

A devotional author, Sarah Young, writes:

The curse of this age is overstimulation of the senses, which blocks out awareness of the unseen world… The goal is to be aware of unseen things even as you live out your life in the visible world. ¹

2 Corinthians 4:18 talks about the sense of sight:

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

A whole world of the Spirit waits for us to experience without our natural senses: seeing the unseen; hearing the silence; sensing the closeness of God’s precious Presence. In our attachment to Earth, we most comfortably experience everything through our five senses. But, if we would hear what God says to us, we must turn off the sound, so that we hear most clearly with our spiritual ears. In this respect, Silence is golden!

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1 Young, Sarah, Jesus Calling. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008. Devotional for June 15th.