Serious Quiet Time

We worship at a downtown Wichita church. It is only a block from Century II, and is on the East bank of the Arkansas River. This day, as we got out of the car in the parking lot to go in for services, I took notice of the sounds that were invading my ears at that particular time.

An EMS siren was blaring only a couple of blocks from us (As an old EMS attendant, I can still tell the sirens [EMS, Fire, Police] apart by their sounds…mostly). Waiting at the intersection, a car had its radio on entirely too loudly, and was entertaining the whole neighborhood with some kind of something some people call music. A motorcycle pulled up to the light, too, and when the light changed, the throaty sound of a too-loud cycle muffler sort-of killed all other noise for an instant.

Off in the distance were church bells, certainly electronic or perhaps digital, and the general noise of a downtown on a weekend occupied the few quieter seconds when something else didn’t fill the air.

I don’t remember thinking much of those thirty or so seconds between our car and the building, except to think that it seemed noisier than normal, and I hoped for some quiet once in the building. Now that I think about it a little more, I am reminded that for many people, noise and activity are what help keep the demons away. I don’t know if any of these noisemakers had any demons working on them, but think about it.

Most of us have to have some kind of noise or activity going on just about all of our waking hours. The TV has to be going, even if no one is watching. The radio or some kind of music is on in most vehicles all the time. We have radios or stream audio over our computers at work. IPOD’s and other such devices are so commonplace now that we don’t think about them. Why?

Could it be that we don’t want to think about the things we many times think about when we happen to wake at 3am and can’t go back to sleep? It’s quiet then, and we are there only with our thoughts (and maybe a snoring partner). It’s then that we think of job security, our financial situation, our relationships with others, or things even more serious, like our mortality, the existence of God, guilt, forgiveness, and our eternal future.

But as long as we’re preoccupied with something else, these thoughts seem to be pushed out of our minds. They come back, though, as soon as they get the opportunity. We can’t really shake them permanently. We can only suppress them for a time.

I don’t think the people downtown that day were intentionally making noise in order to briefly chase away serious thought (with the possible exception of the radio person), but I do think that we should probably take more time to think about who God is, our relationship with Him, and His with us. And that requires, for the most of us, some serious quiet time alone.