You know the experience you have when turning the radio dial to find a good station, and in between the blips of music and voice you hear lots of irritating static? Sometimes even when you find a good station, the signal's not clear enough to completely eliminate that scratchy sound competing with your favorite song. Lately, in large part because of the election that just happened, I find my 'tuner' to God filled with too much static. Too many outside voices and topics to get wrapped up in with the candidates. Too much internal monologuing about the audacity of this candidate doing such-and-such or even the great attributes of another candidate. At the end of the day, (or more accurately, on November 5th) I had to stop myself and say 'Have I giving even half or a quarter of the thought and prayer to my Heavenly Father that I have been giving to this political election?' Yikes! The voice I really needed to hear had been so covered with other noise that I was neglecting the only truth that saves, the only person who could truly never disappoint. Sometimes it seemed my spiritual radio wasn't even plugged in! Feeling convicted, I have since turned off the politics for a while, hoping to reestablish a crystal clear signal with my Father in heaven. Anyone relate?
~Becky
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I can totally relate Becky. I find with technology today we are bombarded with messages from all angles - e-mail, TV, internet, etc. I love to shut it all off and just focus on God when possible. One way I "shut it off" is to not watch the news all of the time. Most of the time I just watch the weather and sports instead of the first 20 minutes of negative news. I also try to listen to Christian music when driving. When I was a teenager I used to listen to a lot of secular music and I think it had a negative impact on my relationship with God. I'm not saying I think one should never listen to secular music, but in my case I think listening to a lot of it led to "garbage in garbage out."
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Todd! I'm glad you were able to check in with us while you're on vacation. It's a good idea to 'shut it off' as you say...though I find that easier said then done if you're used to always having something on. It's almost like the 'noise' is a security blanket of sorts. When it's just utter silence and I've not been used to that for awhile, my tendency is first to feel bored. Isn't it much more fun to just be entertained or informed on current events? When the 'static' of tv, radio, and internet gets too loud, the easy tendency is to try to give up entirely trying to tune in to God. It definitely takes discipline and focus to see the silence as a GOOD thing, a NECESSARY thing, sort of like what Pastor Mark said on Sunday pertaining to the concentration it takes to pray for an hour, as he was assigned to do in his class. Our attention spans can be so short and easily diverted if we don't train ourselves to bask in some time where it's just us and God.
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