Background Noise

It's always there.

We all have it.

In our lives.

In our minds.

At work.

At school.

At home.

All around us.

No matter what we do.

No matter where we go.

It goes with us.

A constant soundtrack to our existence.



Background noise.



It comes in many different forms.

It may even be uniquely different for every person.

It certainly affects us all differently.

But if there's one thing I know for sure, it's that it affects us.

In fact, some of us would hardly know what to do without it.

And not even just sound, but any type of visual noise as well.

Whether it be music, television, radio, phones, computers, or even just an endless stream of thoughts in the back of the mind.

Or something we really can't even seem to explain.

Even when there isn't anything really going on, there's always something.

Somewhere, some sort of background noise.

Do we even know what it would be like without it?

With real, true, utter silence...

Silence.

Just imagine that for a moment.

Stopping absolutely everything.

Everything that goes on in the world around us.

Nothing but nothing.

Silence.

Could we do it?

Could we stop it?

Could we handle it?

Can we really even imagine it?

And if we could imagine it, even experience it, can we imagine what might happen in that silence...

What might we hear, even in the silence...

If you don't know anything about the Bible, let me just say one thing about it. It's absolutely stuffed with crazy ridiculous absolutely awesomely amazing stories. Stories about an incredible awesome loving God. And one of those stories involves a guy named Elijah, a prophet of the Most High God.

Now Elijah was at the time the last of the prophets of God, as the rest had been slaughtered, and had just finished up the showdown of the century with the prophets of this hunk of wood called Baal. Basically how it went down was the prophets of Baal begged and pleaded and cried and danced and even bled themselves, trying to get some lousy inanimate object to send fire from heaven and burn up a sacrificial bull on their altar. Elijah tried to help them out a bit, suggesting that they should try to be a little louder, since maybe Baal just couldn't hear them, that he was sleeping or preoccupied or on vacation or something like that. And so they danced and screamed and shouted and bled some more. As you might expect, they all just ended up wearing themselves out. Not the best of days for those guys.

Eventually, Elijah got tired of goading them on and (talk about cocky) had his sacrifice and the wood it was on doused in water, so much so that the trench he had dug around the altar ended up filling up as well. In case you don't follow the irony of the whole situation, wet things don't exactly burn too well.

And then he prayed.

And then this massive fireball flew down from the sky, totally incinerating every last molecule of bull, wood, stone, soil, and water.

Yeah, even the rocks of the altar and the dirt around it got fried. And not just fried, absolutely obliterated. By fire.

Talk about crazy.

And then what happens next? Oh yeah, some crazy queen tries to get him killed, and Elijah is off like a rocket to hide in the desert. I mean, wouldn't you too?

Here's the really interesting part that I'm trying to get at though. Now Elijah had been though a lot. So much in fact,that he actually even asked for God to let him die out there. This was a guy who was worn out, beaten down.

Tired. So tired.

So Elijah is out in the desert, had been wandering around for weeks, and God tells him to go up on this mountain. Because guess what? The Lord Himself is about to pass by here.

Whoa.

So Elijah climbs on up, preparing himself...

And then out of nowhere this massive wind tears through, ripping apart mountains and shattering rocks, sending them flying everywhere.

But God isn't there. He's not in the wind.

And then there's this ridiculous earthquake, and more of the same chaos ensues.

But still, no God.

And as if that wasn't enough, this crazy fire starts raging around, totally engulfing everything. You've got to wonder what Elijah was thinking was up by this point.

Because still, God wasn't in the fire either.

Then he heard it.

A gentle whisper.

And that's when Elijah went out and spoke to God Himself.

Now, there's actually a bit of discussion about what that " gentle whisper" really means in the original Hebrew it was first written in. In fact, there's the idea that the word for it really means complete, total, utter...

Silence.

So this is where I raise the question...

What kind of affect would it have on our lives if we were to let the winds calm, the earthquakes subside, the fires fizzle out, the noise to just stop?

What if we were able to just sit there in the silence...and listen...

I mean honestly, think about what it would be like to not have or make any noise at all. Can we do that...and if we can are we able to do so without any feelings of discomfort or just plain weirdness? What is it that makes silence so...awkward? We have to tap our foot or drum our fingers, clear our throats, hum some sort of sound. Think of something, anything to say.

Something, anything to break the silence.

But what if we got rid of all the distraction, all of the insanity that is life as we know it, if were somehow able to just stop ourselves, our minds, for even a moment? What if we could turn down the volume, tune out the static, and really,truly, listen to the silence? And what if it actually became a regular part of our routine?

To just stop.

To just sit.

To just listen.

What might we hear in the silence?

Is there a connection between the amount of noise in our lives and our inability to hear God?
~Rob Bell

Who might show up in that silence...

Dive Deep