Silence the Noise

The world is so loud.

My flesh is so loud.

People are so loud.

Life is noisy. It’s annoying…

Do you ever notice how when you have too many sounds coming at you at once, that you have to make one of them louder if you really want to hear that one?

I was moving out of college after my last final. I had my car all packed up, I checked out, and was just SO ready to leave that place. I typically drive my car with my windows down because I have no a/c. But this time, I picked up on something strange. Maybe it was because I no longer had the college noises to worry about with obligations of things to do which enabled me to “listen” and pay closer attention to something more…

The windows being down creates a wind noise… a loud one. I love it. Riding with my windows down is one of my favorite things (riding in a convertible of some sort with the top down is the absolute greatest tho!). Who needs a/c right? You can stick your arm out the windows or through the sunroof and just lift your hands to the Lord when prompted, feeling the cool air rushing past your arms and between your fingers! It’s amazing.

But… I also have to have music going in my car when I’m driving, otherwise I drive poorly. Make fun of me if you like, but it’s just one of those things. If in those off moments when I turn my music off, those are typically when I just sing alone to the Lord. So either way, a song is going on. But it’s been my own running joke ever since I started driving that if I don’t have music on when I’m behind the wheel, we’re liable to wreck. Slightly morbid thought, maybe, but you get the gist of the joke… I have to have music going to drive! It helps me focus and not over-analyze things going on within the drive.

Along this drive a few days ago, I listened as the noise of the wind from the open windows caused the music I was listening to to have to be turned up louder… crank it up to 30, but when windows are up it can be 17.

I thought to myself “WOW… this is JUST like trying to walk with the Lord in this world! All this noise…”

Noise crowds in on us from all directions… much like the wind of my open windows surrounds me. The thing is, I can turn up my volume knob on my stereo system to listen to what I want to. God doesn’t speak like my stereo though and we miss His voice all the time since He’s not under our control. We can’t ‘turn him up’ or make him louder under our own terms. So if we want to hear His voice in all this noise, we have to find a way to silence the other noises…

I have a lot of other noises. It’s sickening. But the Lord is bigger than those noises, even if His voice is just a whisper… so when I yearn to hear Him and seek intimacy with Him, the noises of this world start to grow less and less pronounced.

I discovered something else yesterday and today though along these lines… the place that I find the most silence of those worldly, fleshly, inside and outside noises is when I’m outside in things the Lord created. I had a moment yesterday just sitting near a roaring waterfall… it was loud… but it was a different kind of loud. It was a beautiful almost heavenly kind of loud, not the distracting-from-God’s-voice kind of loud… it was almost like a part of His voice, you know? Since it was something He’d created and spoke into existence. I’m glad the amazing person I was with wanted to sit down for a moment on a log in front of it and take it in as well. Had we not stopped, I don’t know if I’d of paid this close attention to something the Lord wanted to show me.

I didn’t officially begin to grasp this concept deeper until today when I sat next to another waterfall… I slowed down my day, sat on a rock and was closer to this smaller cascade because it was a waterfall coming down small rocks of a creek instead of down a massive rock. This one was still loud, but I paid even closer attention. I could hear birds singing and the rushing water. I could hear so much more just by sitting there outside and stopping to be with God, than I had been able to for the 9 months I’d been at school. Then I just wanted to sing for Him. And I could sing more freely on that rock next to these falls, maybe because the water noise was organic and God-breathed… so with that kind of noise, it helped silence the others.

Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name;
    worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness.

The voice of the Lord is over the waters;
    the God of glory thunders,
    the Lord thunders over the mighty waters.
The voice of the Lord is powerful;
    the voice of the Lord is majestic.

Psalm 29:2-4

I did not have that verse in my heart until after I finished writing it all out… then I knew there had to be some verses about the Lord’s voice. I was mainly looking for when it talks about His voice as a still, small voice or a whisper. But the Lord took me to this one and I’m just blown away. It is so powerful and incredible how well it fits with what the Lord is showing me! Thank you, Lord!

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