The Sound of Silence

There is a room at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minnesota that will drive you mad. One person has been able to withstand the room for 45 minutes, but most can't last more than thirty. Some people can't even make it inside the room at all. It’s not the color of the walls or the decorations that drive people bonkers. In fact, it isn’t what the room has that causes the effect; it is what it doesn’t have, sound.

This room holds the Guinness World Record for the world's quietest place. The anechoic chamber, which means "no echo", is able to absorb 99.99% of sounds. The sound level in the room is negative 9.4 decibels, but humans can hear sounds only above zero decibels (an average quiet room is about 30 decibels). It is so quiet that many people find it unbearable to stay inside since and it often disorients people or causes them to hallucinate. Other senses are amplified without the reflection of sound off the walls, and without these reflections, balance is thrown off and there are no cues for a person to orient themselves. The complete disorientation is just too much for a person’s system to handle.[i]

You might not think silence would be so hard for us but in reality, we have a hard time staying quiet. We have to talk, to say something. We need the fill the void, even if it means saying or doing something unnecessary. We struggle to keep our tongue still.

Do not be hasty in word or impulsive in thought to bring up a matter in the presence of God. For God is in heaven and you are on the earth; therefore let your words be few.

Ecclesiastes 5:2

You see that in how we react to the events of the day. Even without the facts, many feel the need to express their opinions on topics. Everyone has an answer even when there are no real answers. We talk all around it. Take after take is given, arguments are made but nothing is ever solved. Our talk is an attempt to control what we know we can’t have control over. Many words attempt to fill the emptiness, but the void of the unknown absorbs them all.

My soul waits in silence for God only; From Him is my salvation.

Psalms 62:1

The psalmist understood it best. Rather than spew forth empty word, we need to embrace silence. God’s senses are beyond our capacity. I might not be able to handle the world but he can. Rather than try to mumble my way along, I can find more real comfort in waiting on and trusting in God. He is in control, no matter what I say.

[i] Knowledge Stew, Volume 2 by Daniel Ganninger

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog