There is one word that has been following me around the past two weeks — one word that has really been kicking my butt: noise.
It all started on June 24th, when I wrote a quick apology because there was so much noise that I couldn't hear myself think — I had no words. Nothing to write here, and really nothing to say in general (ask the girls in Thursday night group — I had a hard time articulating anything useful during our last meeting).
Then I went to a Tuesday night nooma, which I had said I wasn't going to go to, but at the last minute changed my mind. The video that week was — you guessed it (or you read my blog about it) — noise.
While I was in North Carolina this past week, the theme continued. I was most content — and most aware of this contentness — when there was the least noise. Sitting on the porch listening to the bullfrogs, riding a horse to the top of a mountain, spending time alone reading in my bedroom, even just playing a game of Scrabble or losing miserably in a game of ping-pong. It wasn't that there was a complete absence of audible noise in these moments (those who know me know that I will never experience total silence anyway). It was that there was an absence of life noise — calendar ticklers, to-do lists, chores, phone calls, deadlines, Post-It® notes… No piece of paper or computer dialog telling me what I ought to be doing at that moment, and making me feel guilty for not doing it.
Sometimes I forget that all of these things that fill up our schedules are not who we were created to be. We were not created to pick up the dry cleaning or go to meetings or work through lunch. These things are a part of life for many of us and aren't inherently bad, but they are very good at taking our eyes and our minds off of what really matters.
For so many adults I know, life is about serving on committees and driving the carpool and making lunches and making dinners and sewing ribbons onto pointe shoes and attending church on Sundays and making cookies for the bake sale and going and going and going and never stopping for a minute to let God get a word in edgewise. Rob Bell calls this a Superwhatever. Supermom. Superdad. Superemployee. Stuperstudent. He writes that we need to take our Superwhatevers out back and shoot them. They do nothing more than make us into a shell of a person, riddled with the guilt of not doing more. Not being a good enough "whatever". Bang.
Getting older in America seems to involve a sort of crescendo, noise that gets louder and louder. And the louder your life is — the more stuff you have on your calendar — the more you feel like you're contributing to the world, or (and this is where I'm going with all of this) the more needed you feel. The more you feel like you are essential on this earth.
Because if you were gone, who would take care of all that stuff on your calendar?
I have a dozen things on my to-do list; therefore I am.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not suggesting we throw out the baby with the bathwater. Carpools and baked goods and pointe shoe ribbons and calendar ticklers are not the problem. The problem exists when that's all there is. When your response to someone asking you about yourself is a list of bullet points on a resume or a job title.
Because those things are not a complete picture of who God created you to be. They may be part of a bigger picture, or they may be detracting from it.
I'm sitting in front of a distraught woman on a plane from Asheville to Charlotte. She is probably in her mid-sixties, and is more defensive than I have ever known a person to be. It seems that every other sentence is interjected to defend the previous sentence. I don't even know what she's talking about; all I know is that I can feel the tension from a few feet away and I am desperately trying to contain my desire to turn around and tell her that none of it matters.
I don't know what point she's trying to make, but zoom out and I can almost guarantee that it doesn't matter. It didn't matter yesterday and it won't matter tomorrow. And even though it seems like the end of the world in this moment, it's far from that.
I look out the window at the mountains in the distance. They matter. Mountains matter. Our everyday life noise… just doesn't.
This woman's diatribe against whomever wronged her, like the ticklers and the Post-It notes and the extra stuff we take on to make ourselves feel useful is merely noise. And noise doesn't matter.
The more of it I hear and feel around me, the less I am able to listen to what God is speaking into my life.
I remember my pastor back home giving a sermon called, "What Would Jesus Throw Out?" The sermon was geared toward the church and all of the unnecessary baggage that seems to come with it. Committees. Hierarchies. Agendas. Bigger buildings. I could probably add a few more of my own to that list but I won't. The church started as something so pure, so organic, so centered around Truth. And today we see so much extra junk tacked on. So much noise.
Sound familiar?
I look at myself and I think, "What would Jesus throw out?"
And I'm pretty sure the answer is that he'd throw out whatever it is that keeps veering me off course. Whatever I define myself and my life by that isn't centered around Truth. If there's ever a choice between checking a few items off my to-do list and spending time in prayer or just working on me, he'd throw away my to-do list.
He'd throw away my noise.