Silence...
Ssshh...
Have you ever heard the sound of silence. Not the Simon and Garfunkel song, which in many ways is the antithesis of what I am talking about, but the sound of REAL silence.
I've done a fair bit of radio work over the years and there is nothing that is dreaded more in that industry than so-called "dead air." Silence... Nothing disturbing the air molecules around the microphone that can then be converted into electrical signals, which are then disseminated across the world to fill any gaping void in the soundscape around people's lives...
Thanks to radio, TV, ipods etc., combined with the unrelenting noise of modern life, technical tinnitus... the rumble of traffic, the muffled roar of aircraft all around, the hum of electricity, the whirr of computer and aircon fans... silence is a rare commodity...
But perhaps in this Lenten season, with its central image of Christ in the midst of the wilderness, and my own period of sabbatical, a useful discipline might be the pursuit of silence...
Silence which Eugene Peterson describes as:
"not a silence of absence, but of presence......not a sterile silence, but a pregnant silence."
Ssshh...
Selah
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