Be Silent

This is a hard time for me right now, I am embarking on a media fast with 8 of our high school students and 3 of our leaders. Which means I can’t watch TV, go on the internet, text message, read anything other than Christian inspired non-fiction and the bible as well as no movies or music. For those of you who know me I pride myself on being a pseudo-techno nerd, so giving up all of these outlets is going to be difficult for me, as well as the students. But it is a good thing to unplug from the noise of the world. Jesus made a habit of this as we can see in Mark 1:35, “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus withdrew to a solitary place to be alone with God and pray.”
So if the creator of the earth finds it necessary to draw away from people and be in silence isn’t that something we should be doing on a regular basis as well? We are inundated 1,000’s of images and noises every day and because of this when we turn off our radio in the car we feel a suffocating kind of silence. Why is silence so hard to deal with? I posed this questions to our eight high schoolers and they decided it was because once it is silent, you begin to do self-reflection, you begin to think and for a lot of us we turn on the noise in our lives so we don’t have to think about what is happening or going on.
This week take some time and sit, breathe deep and be silent. Don’t turn on the television or radio, don’t read a book, just sit, breathe and be silent. See if it makes a difference in your life to stop and just be silent. Happy Youthing.