Each week the connection group I am apart of studies a different spiritual discipline, this past week we focused our hearts and minds around understanding silence. Here is a post I wrote for our connection group's blog page.
According to Coach D, “Silence is abstaining from sound in order to open our spiritual ears and listen more closely to the voice of God. God seldom speaks loudly. He usually speaks in a ‘still small voice,’ often little more than an impression in our minds (see 1 Kings 19:12 KJV).”
The start of this week was exciting and different than most, I attended our annual spring Community Life Retreat. It was a time of focused growth in the areas of character and leadership. One of the best part of the retreat was not having a television, radio, and computer. As I reflected outside in nature on the retreat grounds, I thought about all the times I walk in to my apartment and turn on the television just for the noise or the amount of time I spend on my computer checking emails and blogs. I am not saying all this modern things evil or bad, but if they become the driving focus of our lives can we truly hear the voice of God?
Coach calls us to, "learn to displace those noisy thoughts by concentrating on one thing, perhaps a Scripture passage or a scene from the Bible." I read these words and my heart is moved to listen and sit in silence in order to open our lives up to God's heart to replace all the noise of one's life. The next time you sit down on the couch and start to turn on the television ask yourself the following questions:
How many hours each day is the television on?
When you are out to dinner or coffee, how time do you spend listening to your companions?
How has the past week led to a deeper dependence on God through your experience of Silence?
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2 comments:
josh, i heard somewhere if you were to try and record silence, just to get a audio clip of 1 minute it would take a week recording. good thoughts
hey Nate, I heard something like that also about recording nature. That for movies it took about 30 hours to get 2 hours of nature around 20 years ago, but now it take 90 hours to get 1 hour of nature noise for movies. Our world has been so filled with noise and silence is so faraway from most people.
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