Coffee maker signaling the end of the brewing cycle. Alarm clock. AC unit. Birds. Footsteps. The bell on checking in at the gym. Weight machines clanking. Rowing machines swooshing. Water running. Dishwasher rinsing. Utensils against breakfast plates. Diesel engine rumble in next lane. Gas pump beeps. These are all sounds I’ve heard today. What have you heard? What sounds have occurred that you may not have paid attention to?
This makes me wonder what sounds regularly occur that I don’t notice, that are so familiar I no longer ‘hear’ them at all. This makes me wonder, too, if there are ‘sounds’ from the Holy Spirit living in me, if there are noises, or evidences that he’s up to something, if he’s preparing an assignment for me, if he’s pacing, antsy, waiting for me to get around to noticing him? I’ve recently read some statistics that say there are one hundred sixty-seven million (167,000,000) individuals in the US with the Holy Spirit living in them (to be taken with a grain of salt, I’m sure, but still…). That number would make, three million, three hundred forty thousand (3,340,000) of those ‘empowered’ individuals per state, given equal distribution throughout all fifty states. (my math fails here, of course, because that figure is greater than the total population of 21 of the states!) Even with the glaring discrepancies, that’s a lot of human bodies pulsating (is there a sound for that?) with the unlimited energy of the always-on-assignment Holy Spirit living inside them.
Could the cumulative Holy Spirit ‘sound’ be registerable in the atmosphere? Is it possible that prayers and singing worship songs and reading Scripture aloud and breaking bread together and fellowship and sharing stories of God’s greatness are also ‘sounds’ emanating from the activity of the Holy Spirit in us? Are climate changes contemporary versions of Jesus’ prediction about, ‘stones crying out’ in our silence, our not hearing? Can we still ‘hear’ what he’s saying, how he’s directing, how he’s wanting to encourage? Is this what the Psalmist intended when he wrote: “Be still and know that I am God.”? Could our ‘being still’ invite us to a new level of hearing? I wonder about these things sometimes. PD
