Just a few minutes ago we observed two minutes of silence, and if you are like me, it seemed like a really long two minutes.

Most of us aren’t all that comfortable with silence. It seems awkward, and we are often tempted to fill it with something.

But there are times that we want less noise in our lives.

Have you ever turned down the radio when you were driving, so you could find your way to some place unfamiliar? Or told someone, “Turn that down. I’m trying to think.”

But in many cases, it seems we prefer noise of some kind, over silence.

I’m one of those people who always has something on.

When I was growing up, there was always a radio playing in our home. You never came home to a quiet house.

My dad was a sea captain and away a lot, and Mom said she didn’t like returning to a silent house.

When I was a kid, I used to sleep with the radio on. I remember the first night in our new apartment after we got married, when we were getting ready to go to sleep and Angela asked, “Are you going to turn the radio off?” She wasn’t asking a question.

When I work in the office, most of the time, I have music playing. When I drive, I’m listening to the radio, my music playlist, or an audiobook.

Angela and I try to get to the pool once a week, and when I swim, I listen to music with open-ear headphones.

I used to think it was because I didn’t enjoy being alone with my thoughts, but then I realized that my thoughts can be really tiring.

When I’m walking, or swimming or driving, my mind is racing from one thought to another, and it is mentally exhausting.

That familiar music or an audiobook helps me focus on one thing.

But, and you know that after the but comes the truth. Sometimes, the noise keeps me from hearing what I should be hearing. Ask Angela, or ask God.

We are coming to the end of our Find Time series, and since the beginning of October, we’ve looked at finding time. Last week, I spoke about Finding time for What’s important. Before that, it was Find Time to Rest. On Thanksgiving Sunday, I spoke about the need to find time to give thanks, and in the introduction to the series I talked about how we can’t make time; it’s already been made. We can only find time. We do that by choosing to not do something so that we can do something else.

And whether we acknowledge that or not, we do it every day in all kinds of situations. When you spend time doing something, you could have spent that same time doing something different.

Sometimes, after spending time on something unfruitful, perhaps on hold for customer service, or waiting in line at Service Canada, I will comment, “well that’s an hour of my life I will never get back.”

And that is the reality. When time has been spent, it is gone, and it can’t be retrieved. Sometimes, I wish I had a rewind button so that I could go back and choose to do something different, but unfortunately, that’s not an option.

When Rob and I were planning this series, he loaned me a book by Jordan Raynor, entitled “Redeeming Your Time”. Because I had several solitary road trips planned, I bought the audiobook to listen to in the car.

As you might assume, it is a time management book. The first four chapters, I kind of slogged through. There really wasn’t anything in them that really lit my fire, and that’s probably just me. But then I hit Chapter Five, which is entitled “Dissent from the Kingdom of Noise.”

The title of the chapter is a reference to C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape letters. If you aren’t familiar with the book, it was written in 1942, and it consists of 31 letters written by a senior demon named Screwtape to his young nephew, Wormwood.

Wormwood is a junior tempter on Earth who has been assigned to corrupt a young British man referred to simply as “the Patient”.

Rather than promoting grand, spectacular sins, Screwtape advises that the most effective way to separate humans from God is through gradual, quiet compromise and mundane distractions. In other words, life.

As part of that, Screwtape explains to his nephew how hell uses constant commotion to pull human souls away from God.

And as I listened to that chapter, I kept saying, “This is good stuff. Our people need to hear this.”

Now I know that you could read the book yourself, and maybe you have and maybe you will, but I’m not going to fool myself. Most of you won’t.

So here is the disclaimer. Most of what I talk about this morning comes from Jordan Raynor’s book.

In the scripture that was read earlier are these words, Psalm 37:7 Be still in the presence of the Lord, and wait patiently for him to act. . .

It’s probably just me, but I find that really difficult. First to be still in the presence of the Lord, and secondly waiting patiently.

The term ADHD didn’t exist when I was a kid, that doesn’t mean ADHD didn’t exist, they just didn’t have a name for it.

I was just a little scattered. A little hyper and I found it difficult to focus. And I didn’t have all the distractions that surround us today.

I lived in a fairly quiet world, in the country, on a dirt road for many years. We didn’t have the internet, social media and we only got two channels on our TVs, but my life still had noise in. Both external and internal.

In his book, Jordan Raynor defines noise this way: “Noise: external information and entertainment that block our ability to be silent and reflective.”

Here are Four Ways Noise Robs Us.

1. Noise Robs Us of Time to Think. This goes back to turning down the radio when you are trying to find an address or telling someone to be quiet so you can think.

But this noise isn’t necessarily the radio or someone talking. It’s the noise that consumes us from all our devices, whether they be your phone, your computer, or the television.

Pastor Kevin DeYoung writes, “We are always engaged with our thumbs, but rarely engaged with our thoughts.”

We are offered so many choices today that it becomes increasingly difficult to think about any one thing.

You’ve heard me speak before about the paradox of choice, and as we get more choices, it becomes increasingly more difficult to make a choice.

Herbert A. Simon was a scholar who wrote about decision making, and he made this statement, “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Or to quote Mr. Rogers “Just be quiet and think. It’ll make all the difference in the world.”

The noise is our lives is like drinking from a water hose. Yes, I’m that old. There’s nothing wrong with the water. It might even be helpful, but eventually you have to stop.

2. Noise Robs Us of Space to Be Creative.

When I was a kid, I would often tell my parents, “I’m bored”. And they would respond with several things that I could do to fix my boredom. My favourite was when they would tell me to go read a book.

But sometimes, they would suggest housework. So, I learned that maybe it was better to be bored, to find something to amuse myself with or just not to mention it.

Here’s a question. Where do you have some of your best ideas? For me, it’s when I wake up at 3:00 a.m. because there is an absence of noise. For most people, the answer would be in the shower. And the reason is the same. It is one of the very few places that we exist without external stimuli.

As most of you know, I have written two books. The first “The Penn of Denn, the World through Denn Coloured Glasses”, was simply a compilation of already written Penns of Denn, they had already been created.

However, my second book is a novel called A Fisherman’s Tale.

I started it when I was on vacation, and the plan was to finish it at home. But that never happened because there was too much noise in my life.

Not bad noise, but just stuff. And so, I picked away at the book each year while we were on vacation. By vacation, I mean we were cruising where I had no access to the internet, and my world was quiet.

And there has to be a commercial here, so both books are available on Amazon or from me.

3. Noise Robs us of Peace.

In Raynor’s book, he tells us that in 2007, three things happened.

You know what the first thing is. It’s in your purse, or your pocket, or your hand, and you are looking at it instead of listening to me.

It was in 2007 that Apple introduced the first iPhone. Less than twenty years ago, a smart phone was not something that everyone carried, everywhere, all the time. But now it is.

The second thing was that 2007 ushered in a 10-year decrease in productivity compared to the previous decade.

Third, almost overnight, the rates of teen depression and suicide in those born between 1995 and 2012 skyrocketed.

Dr. Jean Twenge is a professor at San Diego State University who has been studying psychological trends in kids for more than a quarter of a century.

She dubbed this cohort as the iGen, and wrote, “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.”

She goes on to say that “. . .this spike in anxiety corresponds to exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.”

Author and professor Arthur C. Brooks sums it up by saying, “The technology that has dominated our lives has broken our brains.”

And it’s not just our smartphones. We now live in a time where we are fed a constant stream of news. Most of it bad.
 

When CNN introduced 24-hour news in 1980, it was considered a novelty. Nobody really thought it would catch on. Who in the world would want to watch news all the time?

But now we have CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CBC News Network, CTV News Channel, CityNews Channel and dozens of others on TV, not to mention the plethora of them being streamed to our computers and phones.

One study revealed that more than half of Americans, and I’m sure it’s the same for Canadians, say that news causes them stress. And yet 1 in 10 say they check the news every hour.

I had weaned myself off of news years ago and said that if anything important happened somebody would tell me.

Unfortunately, one of the consequences of COVID was I was drawn back into checking news throughout the day, and I realized how much stress it added to my life.

The New Testament provides an antidote for the anxiety caused by our smart phones and constant news streams in Philippians 4:6–8 Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honourable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.

And so, a line can be drawn from verse six, about not worrying to verse eight what we choose to think about. The question is how much of what we feed ourselves through social media and the news is true, and honourable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Excellent and worthy of praise?

4. Noise Robs Us of Listening to God’s Voice

This is probably the most important one on the list. When our lives and our minds are full of noise it makes it hard to listen to God. Listen to the words of Psalm 46:10 “Be still, and know that I am God!”

And in the scripture that was read for us earlier, Psalm 37:7 Be still in the presence of the Lord, and wait patiently for him to act. Don’t worry about evil people who prosper or fret about their wicked schemes.

God knows that to not only hear what he is saying, but to listen to what he is saying, we need to step away from the noise. Emily P. Freeman writes, “Stillness is to my soul as decluttering is to my house.”

So how do we step away from the noise in our lives? Good question.

Raynor offers 10 different practices in his book. I’m going to focus on four of them, and you’ll have to read the book to see the other six.

Stop Swimming in Infinity Pools. Most of you probably know what an infinity pool is. It is a reflecting or swimming pool designed to create a visual illusion of water extending endlessly into the horizon. Here is a photo of one.

But that’s not what I’m talking about because swimming in a real infinity pool is kind of cool.

Instead, what I’m talking about are digital apps that never run out of stuff to look at (e.g., social media feeds, news sites, video platforms, and endless email)

It might be Facebook or Instagram, X, Threads or YouTube. As they used to say in the old westerns, name your poison.

Regardless of how it starts, each rabbit hole leads to a new rabbit hole. And you check the weather, and three hours later, you are watching a video about the hibernation habits of Tibetan yaks.

If you are looking for an alternative to some of those rabbit holes, try subscribing to a newsletter that provides a news round-up. Or go old school and try reading a physical news magazine or newspaper.

There is so much noise out there that doesn’t apply to us and simply clutters our soul.

Parent Your Phone

Studies have shown that your ability to concentrate suffers simply by having your smartphone in the same room as you. Even when it’s silenced or turned off.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we all go back to a rotary dial phone on the kitchen wall. I love what my iPhone can do for me. I use it for banking, for listening to music, and to check my emails. As a GPS to get where I’m going and to find deals on things.

But I should be in control of it, and it should not be in control of me.

In his book, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place author Andy Crouch points out, “The mere presence of your smartphone in your pocket is a nudge, a gentle reminder that just a tap away are countless rewards of information, entertainment and distractions.”

How do we parent our phones? The same way that we parent our kids. By setting guardrails and rules for them.

You get to determine what time your phone goes to bed in the evening and what time it gets up in the morning. 

My phone goes on sleep mode, from 10 pm until 8 am. And you might be thinking, “Denn, what if someone needs you?”  I have a VIP list on my phone, that will override the do not disturb.  Angela, both our kids, my mother, my sister and Telus.  Why Telus?  They monitor the church alarms.

I was at the Global Leadership Summit in Moncton with most of our pastoral staff last week.

One of the speakers was Arthur C. Brookes. Brooks is the Kohler Family Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University and a senior fellow at Harvard.

And he offered some suggestions here. First, he said we need Tech free time. And the times he suggested were:

The First hour of the Day. Brooks stated that the first hour of our day is, and I quote, the Neuro cognitive programing Hour. That first hour shapes your day. And what do you want your day shaped by?

Not to be upfront. I track my food and weight every morning. That’s just who I am. Most days, I know what I will eat for breakfast and for lunch. And so, when I’m getting dressed, I put that in my app. And then I don’t look at my phone for another hour.

The second time Brook says should be a tech-free zone is Mealtimes. I’m not a scientist, but Brooks is, and he says that oxytocin is often called the hormone of human bonding. And it is produced when we are with the people we love and are making eye contact.

Traditionally for thousands of years, that often happened at mealtimes. Goes way back to families sitting around a campfire, eating roasted woolly mammoth and talking about how their day of hunting and gathering went.

And you say, “I can’t get my kids to not have their phones at the table.” Do you know what the number one predictor of your kids looking at their phones at the table is? Yeah, you, looking at your phone at the table.

And finally, Brooks says, that the Last hour of the Day, should be a tech-free time. There are all kinds of reasons. Studies show that the blue light coming from our phones disrupts our sleep patterns, and the overstimulation of the content we are watching makes it difficult to fall asleep.

However, here’s where things get interesting. Not only have studies shown that productivity and happiness have declined with the advent of smartphones, but some studies have shown that marital intimacy has declined as well.

It used to be that you went to bed with your spouse, and those in the marriage counselling business said that our beds should be reserved for two things. One of those was sleep. But neither of those two things involved your phone. But now, through our phone we invite the world into bed with us as well.

And two quick practices to tie things up.

Get Comfortable with the Crevices of Your Day. If you follow the first two practices, you will find yourself with little slivers of found time. Periods of silence you didn’t know you had. Don’t try and fill them.

The next time you’re waiting for an elevator, or your doctor, resist the temptation to open your phone. The next time you jump in your car to run an errand, leave the radio off.

Maybe if you are reading a book and get to the end of a chapter and have a couple of minutes of reading time left, resist turning the page.

Raynor says we need to develop the skill of being bored. And you start by not filling the cracks and crevices of your day with noise.

And finally, Put the Quiet back in Quiet Time. Take time to connect with God. When you read the Bible, don’t just read it for information. Read it to hear from God.  

Remember where we started this morning. Psalm 37:7 Be still in the presence of the Lord, and wait patiently for him to act.

And maybe wait patiently for Him to speak to us.

Just pause as you read and do nothing. Raynor writes, “Just sit and meditate on what you are reading, allowing the Spirit to connect the dots from the Word to your heart.”

We began this series talking about the fact that we can’t make time. Time is already made. We can only find it.

And sometimes finding time means turning off the television, putting down the phone, leaving the radio off. Lean into the silence and simply being still.

Not because silence is the goal, but because our relationship with God is too important to allow it to be crowded out by everything else.

Maybe this week, instead of filling every available moment with something, we could leave a little room for God.

Be still in the presence of the Lord and wait patiently for him to act.

And for a few moments, I’d invite you to be still and reflect on what God has done for us as we take time to remember.