Listen

Listen.  Did you hear that?

When’s the last time you sat in silence for at least 10 minutes?....and just listened?

For most of us, we give very little emphasis to attentive listening.  Our day is filled with noise.  In fact, we live in a time when most of us have filled any void with noise.

On our walk this morning, Leigh Anne and I passed a jogger who we could hear coming from a fifty yards away.  It wasn’t her panting from struggling to make it up the hill. No, it was the blaring music coming from her ear pods.

Now I understand how listening to music while running can help keep your mind from focusing on the pain or the monotony from running.

But it made me wonder if we haven’t filled our lives with noise -- Noise that prevents us from considering the deeper meaning of life, from facing truths that challenge the way we are living.

We live in a day where noise is competing with more noise.

Shouts from protesters, politicians, news media, talk radio and on and on.

Do we even know what we really value or are we merely reacting to what we hear, or even worse, parroting what someone else has told us we should believe, how we should vote, what we should do?

Is our life so filled with the loud voices shaping who we are that we have failed to see the incongruencies in our thought pattern, the lack of integrity in our choices?

Have we been so programmed by other voices, that the wall of noise has established a barricade against hearing God’s truth?

I find it interesting in studying the scriptures and the writings throughout Christian history, over and over I see this call to listen.

In the first chapter of Proverbs we read:

The wise will hear and increase in learning.

St. Benedict, the 6th century founder of western monasticism, writes this opening phrase for community life:

Listen carefully…

C. S. Lewis counseled -

The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.

So I challenge you today to silence, to listen in the quiet.

I’ll follow up next time with thoughts about listening to God or listening to your inner self, or even listening to others. 

But today, carve out 10 minutes to sit, to unplug….to sit in silence and listen.

You may feel strange, you may find it weird, maybe even difficult. 

But sit ... and listen.