Noisy Christians

We live in a culture that is afraid of silence.

We are saturated by noise. It fills our veins. It's our drug.

It's so bad that many get their fix off of 140 characters at a time. It's a quiet tweet but a noise nonetheless.

Most of the time it's much louder. There's never silence.

There's always some kind of noise that fills our moments. We are creators of the noise.

This week I was reminded of this when my family experienced a death. I noticed how uncomfortable we are with silence. We open our mouths and let sacred moments be degraded because we fear the silence.

We are always desiring to be in some kind of conversation. We want answers. That's really only a half truth: we want to be the one who gives the answer.

More often than not the wisest thing you can say is nothing at all (or at least that's what I'm finding when I'm courageous enough to keep my mouth shut).

Something that all Christians need to learn is to shut up. (Sounds harsh, but I'm one of those who need to learn the lesson. Considering that I have diarrhea of the mouth.)

Instead of disturbing the ever present noise, maybe we should be quiet.

We shouldn't always be the first ones to speak. Or the last.

We should think before we speak.

Maybe, just maybe, we need to listen before we give our opinion.

That includes times when our opinion is sound Biblical advice. Before saying it, we should ask the Holy Spirit for guidance.

Why? Because we don't know everything.

Deuteronomy 29:29 says that there are secret things that we don't know. Those secrets belong to God. However, the revealed things belong to us. We don't know everything. And that's okay!

I struggle with this.

I struggle with understanding that it's okay to have more questions than answers.

It's taken me three decades to learn that being left with more questions than answers isn't a bad thing. That questions lead to faith. And the deeper the questions the more faith and trust that can grow.

There's not a way to fix the noise problem. The volume will always be turned up to the max. Maybe if all the world goes off the power grid like on NBC's Revolution. But other than that there isn't an answer. Only questions and a lot of noise.

Jesus does want all Christians to speak truth and love into the world. But not as much as he wants us to BE those things. We need to listen long enough to see where, who, why, and how to speak truth and love. We shouldn't be so eager to speak that what we say just becomes a part of the noise.

How do you cope with an ever noisy world?