Noise and Silence: When It’s Too Loud You Can’t Hear
We often think noise is the antidote to silence. The quieter the room, the quicker we must fill the space—share a thought, ask a question, or create a conversation.
The silence can feel intimidating because it invites exposure and scrutiny. If we’re in a space with other people, there’s an awareness that others may observe us, collecting data on us and forming opinions about us. In the process we don’t know what they’re thinking, which gives us little opportunity to speak up and give our perspective.
If we are the only person in the room, the silence amplifies our own awareness of what’s going on in us and around us. The sound of your own heartbeat. The ticking clock. The way your lungs fill with air.
Have you ever sat in a quiet space and your ears began to ring? That subtle conduction of noise sends us searching for another sound to fill the space. But in that moment when our ears ring, our brain is actually increasing its signals. What was fascinating in this article was how “a quiet environment strips away the masking effect of background sound, making it impossible to ignore.” Because noise and silence battle each other.
When everything goes quiet, we squirm and try to suppress the scrutiny. But what if the scrutiny is the place God wants us so we see ourselves and Him more clearly?
Stop Noise and Find Silence
Our culture engrains in us the necessity of noise. If we want to feel connected to the world around us, we need to invite noise into our lives. Turn the music up on the car ride. Put on a TV show in the background while you’re cooking dinner. Listen to the news report while you take a walk. Fall asleep to a podcast.
Consume content. Receive opinions. Repeat the cycle. If you want to stay in the know, you need to fill your ears with the information to keep you in the know. More noise and less silence.
Despite the promises of consuming information, being part of the inner circle, and staying trendy, we can get to the end of the day exhausted and overburdened by all the input. We’ve received numerous reports, but we haven’t had time to filter them.
When we push back against this ideology and invite quiet into our lives, we invite a deeper form of relational intimacy. The quiet strips us of our comforts. The quiet rips open our insecurities.
What if the noise is hiding the idols we’ve gotten too comfortable worshiping? What if God wants to meet us in the quiet and show us His satisfaction is better than what we thought would satisfy?
The Lord loves us too much to let us miss His voice in our lives, and often it means walking through an experience that exposes our flaws first. This happened when I found myself in the ER.
I wanted answers. I wanted healing. After being sick for a month with an unexplainable cough and normal test results, I was grasping at straws. I was in contact with all my nurse friends asking for their opinions. I’d seen my primary care doctor three times in a week. I was advocating for every test I could think of to be run and every supplement I knew to be recommended.
The next morning after coming home from an inconclusive ER visit, I woke up to 42 messages. I spent time making phone calls, texting people, driving to pick up medicine, and conducting my own research.
By evening, I was exhausted, overstimulated, and anxious. And I still had no direction of where to go next. I knew something had to change. So I put my phone down and went on a walk. And I realized my own flaw in all the searching.
I was seeking to maintain control and figure things out myself. I was so tuned in to the noise, I was out of tune with the Lord’s voice. The absence of noise showed me I was running to everything but the source of life. I had allowed the noise to mask my deeper need for stillness and in the process, I’d clung to the idols of self and control.
Embrace a Quiet Life
In surrendering the fight and finding a quiet space to breathe, freedom beckoned instead.
When the noise is too loud, we miss the current it’s sweeping us into and soon we’re drug underwater gasping for breath. If we don’t drown out the noise, it will sweep over and keep us from the Voice that wants to save us.
The Lord is ready to fight for you. You do not have to accept a level of noise in your life that silences the one Voice that matters. You were made to embrace the quiet. To expose your idols and demolish them. And when you do, you rest in the arms of the living God who is for you and with you in the quiet.
8 Practical Ways to Be Still and Know God
Put your phone on airplane mode or in a different room for a few hours. Bonus points if you do this at bedtime.
Go for a walk without your phone and take in the beauty of God’s creation.
Read the same Scripture passage for a week. Memorize it. Pray it. Let it saturate your heart and mind.
Journal your thoughts and quiet your mind.
Write out a prayer to God.
Pray with a friend and trust God to act instead of trying to problem solve right away.
Drive with no music on or background noise.
Pick a hobby and engage in it for 30 minutes to let your mind rest.
For triumph,
