Aren’t you sick and tired of the non-stop, in-your-face, never-ending cacophony of noise?
When in my car, I listen to the radio, absorb the opinions of talk-radio hosts, worship music, leadership lectures, or talk on my cell phone.
When at work, the phone on my desk is constantly ringing on one or all of the three lines coming in to the church. Then of course there is e-mail – my mail box is always full and I have to navigate my way through the junk. I process some ten-thousand e-mails per year when I’m not answering the phone, leading meetings, making decisions, and trying to be productive.
I get home in the evening, and it starts all over again. Music is in the background from multiple sources. Someone has a CD player up too loud, another is playing a screaming guitar. There are four television sets in my home – usually on. There are five separate phone numbers in my home (four cells, and one land line) and at any given time one or all are ringing or someone is already talking on their phone.
I plop down in my easy chair and now it’s my turn to watch television – usually one of those twenty-four-hour-we-make-up-the-news channels. I have more than one hundred channels and I usually can’t find anything of interest (or decent) to watch. With the push of a button I can learn about war, automobiles, the stock market, the economy, Obama, or Pamela Anderson. With another push of the button I can learn how stuff is made, how stuff works, how broken things get fixed, how to kill a deer, how to catch a fish, how to lose weight without exercise, or how to clean out my colon.
Beginning the next day, it starts all over again.
Noise. It never ends. This kind of noise affects quality time with your family and it drowns out the voice of God.
1 Kings 19:11-12 says "....but the Lord was not in the wind.....and after the fire a SMALL STILL VOICE." Some translations say, “God was IN THE SILENCE.”
I’m evaluating myself on how I can reduce some of the noise in my life so that I can hear the sounds that really matter, and I've decided I’m going to make the necessary adjustments....
....that is, right after I check my e-mail again, answer the phone, and spend some more time blogging.