Unplugged
John Eldredge talks about our need to "unplug from the matrix". Rob Bell talks about silence. Cell phones, pagers, ipods, tv, TIVO, voice over internet, CD players, car radios, Fox News, NPR .... noise surrounds us. All of us - all the time. We are addicted to noise and can't stand silence.

When was the last time you spent more than about 15 minutes outside, alone just sitting and listening to the sound of wind moving through pine trees? When was the last time you sat by a stone creek and listened to the sound of water running over those mossy rocks? When was the last time you got alone and unplugged from the matrix of human noise? It is hard to do. Very hard.

Is it any wonder then why man questions why he never hears God?

How can we hear him if we are constantly plugging into the noise of this world? How can we hear Him over Bill O'Reilly or Chris Matthews? I mean it is so bad now that the cell phones have these stupid looking devices we can plug into our ear so we can walk around looking like a character from the old Star Trek series. We can now talk on our cell phones with such ease that we don't even have to hold the dang thing. It just sits there plugged into our ears.

That brings up another subject before I get to the real point - the news. Otis and I were having breakfast the other day and he said the news was really getting him down. It is never good and it only serves to aggravate us. He was with John Eldredge a few weeks ago and he brought this up. John kept pushing him as to the "why" he felt he needed to stay plugged in. I've heard John address this before - do we really need to know that there was a coup in Uganda? Does it really matter what Hillary Clinton is saying about the war? Do we really need to get all jacked-up over proposed changes to the social security program? The answer to these questions is simply DOES KNOWING ABOUT ALL THIS CHANGE OUR ABILITY TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT?

No. We can't do anything about the news except have it spoon-fed to us by folks that we could convincingly argue have a far different agenda and set of beliefs than we do. Why do I want to listen to Barbara Streisand spew her venom when all it does is raise my blood pressure? WHY DO I ALLOW THAT NOISE INTO MY LIFE?

As an aside, John hasn't watched the news in 13 years. 13 years. Life goes on. Elections are won and lost. The war is fought. Talking heads argue passionately about the politics inside the beltway. Bad things continue to happen. Why does he need to sit there and watch it?

Why not use that time to unplug from the matrix and listen for God to speak? I mean after all, isn't that who really loves us? It isn't Brian Williams at NBC. It isn't Rush Limbaugh. Noise doesn't love us. It only serves to pull us away from the Liberator who came to free us from the prison.

I mean, is it me or doesn't some time it feel like we are trapped in a prison of noise? We cannot escape it. Everywhere, all the time - noise traps us. The enemy giggles with glee. Keep 'em slammed with busy work, keep 'em drowned in noise, keep 'em on six different community service boards, keep 'em feeling important...drown them so they can't hear Him.

The sound of silence
All this to say, my CD player in my truck broke 2 weeks ago. I've burned tons of custom CD's to fit my mood. Any mood that hits me and I can plug into it. When I don't have a CD I want to listen to, I've got my XM Satellite radio. 200+ channels of noise. Surely, I can find some noise to keep me occupied.

Then, one day, my CD player broke. Suddenly, I found myself not liking my XM so much. All those choices and surely I could find some song I liked. When it failed me, I could always punch in a CD. Then, the CD broke and I began to see XM for what it was - a less than perfect solution.

Yesterday, I had to take my truck in to have my CD player removed. GM takes those and ships them to Jacksonville to see if they can fix them and then will replace them if they can't. But, in order to take the CD player, they had to take my entire radio - CD, radio, XM - the whole thing. Now there is a large hole in my dashboard. Some vital part of my world has been ripped out. Now, there is silence. Hmmmm. I wonder why?

It has been an interesting 24 hours. My girls hop in the truck and instinctively reach for the nob to change the channel only to be greeted by the hole. We drive in silence. We have to talk to each other to exist in the truck. After I drop them off, I have 10-15 minutes by myself alone with God to ride and listen to Him. I watched the rest of the world this morning on the commute. Radios blaring, cell phones pressed to their ears racing to work and another day in the matrix.

God pulled me out of that matrix for this week for a reason. (Did I mention it will take a week to get my radio back?) I'm listening.

Soar!