You know that feeling? The one you get at the end of the day. When it’s finally time to crawl into bed for the night. Maybe you just took a shower and feel refreshed after a busy day. The room is the perfect temperature for sleeping. Everything is still. There are clean sheets on your bed and the thought of crawling into them makes you feel relaxed. As you pull back the covers and crawl into bed, you hear it. It’s now the only thing that you can hear. The sound of it in the silence makes you want to go crazy because it’s so loud. “Why now?” You may think. You also grow annoyed and frustrated. In that moment, all of the relaxing thoughts you once had are now thrown out the window and the only thing that your brain can think about is the buzzing of a single fly flying around the bedroom. Its sound is almost deafening. “I don’t understand why it chose now to be the time to fly around.” But the fly didn’t just decide in that moment to ruin your silence, it had also been there, you just didn’t take the time to listen.

We fill our lives with sound. We fill our lives with stuff. We fill our lives with things that we think we need. It happens way too often in my own life. I try to fill the silence with noise. Thinking that if I do this and that, then I will be content and happy. If I keep myself busy, then things will go the way I think they should go. I fill my life with people so I can base my happiness on them. I fill it with stuff and hope that somehow, someway it will make me feel content. The inside of my head probably looks a lot like a hoarders house because it’s filled with so much stuff. It’s loud and if you were to open the door, you would get way more than you bargained for. Even though it’s filled to the brim, if the same fly that was flying around inside the silence was now flying around in the mess, it would still make the same buzzing sound. The fly wouldn’t change how loud it is, I just wouldn’t be able to hear it because everything else is so loud. The noise of life drowns it out.

We tend to worship the creation and not the Creator. We think we know what is best. We do what we want. We go about our day in and day out lives without even giving thought to The Lord but then when one of the rooms inside our hoarder house catches fire, what is the first thing we do? Some people go to Facebook and post “prayers please.” Others complain. A few will question The Lord and His goodness. Maybe we think we can fix it ourselves. When we can’t fix it, we are left feeling empty and hopeless. Why? Because we are trying to do things on our own strength. Instead of crawling into bed and listening to the single fly that is flying around, we try to put out the fire and fill the room with more stuff so we can fill the silence.

The Lord is a still small voice. He is always there. He never leaves us. He never forsakes us but as humans that live in a sin filled world, it causes us to be distracted. Instead of listening to the silence, we listen to the noise. How often do I take the time to listen to the silence? To just turn everything else off and be still? We can’t listen if we can’t hear and we can’t hear when there is so much noise. Listen to the buzzing in the silence.