Just Noise

Give ear, and hear my voice; give attention, and hear my speech. Does he who plows for sowing plow continually? Does he continually open and harrow his ground? When he has leveled its surface, does he not scatter dill, sow cumin, and put in wheat in rows and barley in its proper place, and emmer as the border? For he is rightly instructed; his God teaches him. (Isaiah 28:23-26 ESV).

Most people are familiar with white noise, that static sound of an air conditioner that lulls us to sleep by drowning out any background noise. Except technically, the whirl of a fan or hum of the AC isn’t white noise at all. Many of the sounds we associate with white noise are actually pink noise, or brown, or green, or blue. In audio engineering, there’s a whole rainbow of noise colors, each with its own unique property, that are used to produce music, help relaxation, and describe natural rhythms like the human heartbeat. If you know what to look for, you can start to notice the colors of the noise that make up the soundscape around you. In fact, if you decompose a sound wave, you can break it down into two fundamental characteristics: frequency, which is how fast the waveform is vibrating per second (one hertz is one vibration per second), and amplitude (sometimes measured as “power”), or the size of the waves. The noise types are named for a loose analogy to the colors of light. That may be way more than you wanted to know about noise. After all, it is all still “just noise.” Regardless, rarely do we ever experience silence. Noise seems to fill our lives. We wake to music or alarms. We get in the car and we turn on the radio, plug in our phones or iPad and stream more noise. When we walk in the house or a hotel room, the first thing we do is turn on the TV. It seems that, with noise, we somehow don’t feel so alone. But, in the midst of all of this noise, we somehow miss the most important sound of all. God still speaks in a still, small voice. In the busyness and noisiness of our lives, it’s easy to miss Him. The only way to hear Him is to make an intentional effort to quiet the noise and spend some time listening, through prayer and reading His Word. You will never get a more important phone call or crucial message. Find some time each day to be alone and quiet. Resist the temptation to have some background sounds and listen to the most important voice of all. I find that when I just sit on the deck at sunset without any noise to distract me, I can hear God very clearly. The truth is that you simply can’t listen to Him if you can’t hear Him. Do this and it will enrich your life tremendously.