Weak or No Signal – The Noise of Life

The busyness of life, the noise of life, is a very powerful force in keeping us from the things that matter most….as well as connecting to God in a meaningful way. The noise of life is like a barrier to experiencing the presence of God.

This is a trap I fall into all the time. I get drawn into things – not really bad things, but things that kill time and keep me from doing the most valuable things, the things I do really well.

We recently bought a Samsung 48″ LED HDTV set and the picture quality is a thing of great beauty. The images, the color, the clarity…are hard to describe, it’s simply spectacular. After watching a movie recently, we left the DVD player on and before long the screen went to “snow” and made a loud hissing noise. In TV language this is actually called “line noise”. Then the screensaver popped up and said — “weak or no signal”. The line noise from the DVR being left on blocked out the usually beautiful picture of the new TV set.

In the noise-laden picture to the right you can see how erratic, how jumbled up, how messed up all the dots are – and there’s no color….just a lot of stuff going on. Now you can see why they call it “noise” in the line. It’s a bunch of mess. It means nothing. There’s just too much erratic stuff going on and the harm it does to the otherwise beautiful picture is depressing.

I really think this is like some of our scattered lives. We change jobs all the time, we join new groups and committees, we check email every 30 seconds, we spend time gossiping, we talk on the phone too much, we Tweet at 1:30 am, we text whoever, we say yes to everything, we spend excessive time worrying, we watch unending hours of tv…whatever…there’s no theme to our life, no underlying vision or goal….just noisy life.

Remove the noise and you get the picture to the left. Crisp, clear, clean, sharp, fresh, beautiful, harmonic sounds, colors galore, arrays of light, visual splendor, a feast for the eyes that reaches the soul.

This is a picture of life in it’s higher form, as near as we can get to God. The picture makes sense, there is life, purpose, meaning, order, beauty. It is a wonderful marvellous thing to watch. If you’ve never seen a 48″ LED HDTV Blue Ray movie, it is pretty close to perfection.

I think this is a picture of our life ‘on purpose’ for God, without the noises we let in. The clear picture tells a story of beauty and hope and clarity to the world.

I encourage you to consider the clutter, the noise, the erratic mess that can fill your days. What noise does God want you to remove? Most of all pray and ask God to reveal what is best and then trust him with the rest.