Silence enough to inhale, ask a question, and let things sort out.
I wrote this a long time ago. I just couldn’t publish it. We got to a place where we had too many plates spinning and too many questions to answer. I wanted to speak but I was too tired of hearing my own voice. Not to mention there was just too many competing voices asking politely for my attention. So I dropped to the back and just let things play out a bit. It is not that we are not speakers. We are more than sufficiently loud. To be fair, we have so many cards stacked against us that no matter how hard we try, noise is going to come from the Corsaut camp. I became self aware that my voice has a booming effect about the millionth time somebody elderly in my family informed me of what an “inside voice” is. They should have known that G-d in His good wisdom saw fit to stuff our family with no shortage of vocal cords, even if I did have a tendency to be excitable from time to time as a youth. And it was not just me, for I have been on the record as having said that my sister has pipes that even that short Dixie Chick, whatever her names is, would envy. We also happen to be Americans. It has become painfully more obvious as each month passes here in France, that Americans are the loudest people that happen to call this planet their home. We are belligerently loud the way people from other cultures get only after a case or two of wine enters their bloodstream. In our experience, if you ever come to Paris and hear some people having a conversation at a volume that makes you wonder if they are using a megaphone, then you can rest assured they are probably sons and daughters of the Red, White, and Blue. Seriously, we sound like we just left a concert where we were standing near a speaker… such that everything we say sounds like we are trying to rally troops or something.
I have safely fallen into this category being someone more than capable of dropping down a few octaves to communicate my points to those who could not grasp them at a normal volume.
Ask my kids. I may not always be right, but I will be louder than the competition and/or a fighter jet. It is funny for me to think that when women get really upset they “raise their voice,” but when a man truly gets upset he tends to drop his voice.
The dad voice is a bearish kind of growl that makes the kids run in fear. Rest assured, I am more about that bass than anyone I know.
Since I have successfully reproduced offspring, there are more of us to make a whole range of noises. For instance, since we have young boys, our family is essentially like a mobile cage match waiting to happen. At the drop of a hat, our boys can be engaged in full contact activity, complete with Native American battle cries (and weapons they find lying about). My wife follows suit acting like a referee; firing off commands like her voice is a semi-automatic rifle. To make matters worse, our newborn daughter acts exactly like a newborn baby. Crazy, I know. A truth known around the world is that babies add decibels at completely unplanned moments. We are built from birth with an cry that arouses our caretakers to pay us attention. One could argue we come out of the womb knowing how best to pray, but I regress. Infants are a beautiful and unplanned volcano waiting to erupt. Go to any Church service or wedding and you will encounter this inescapable reality. That one moment you need silence, you can count on a Corsaut kid to give you some awkward noise from G-d knows where.
Our family is a Mardi Gras parade constantly getting turned up, a circus without a big top.
There is something about all this volume that makes me nervous in crowds though. I mean its not as if French people need any more excuses to think our family is 2007 Brittany Spears crazy. I mean I get it, constant noise wears me out as much as the next guy. Well, not as much as it does people who never have had kids, but still pretty significantly. I have noticed that people without kids have not yet learned the skill of ignoring ear destroying levels of noise like their reproducing counterparts. A seasoned parent can have pure chaos bursting around them and still be able to function in a relatively mature way (*note the word “relatively”). You just get used to constant claps of thunder and waves of emotions when you have kids.
When a baby starts crying, a person without kids frets like they have to disarm an alarm clock attached to a bomb.
More seasoned parents have a magical ability to drown out the noise of their own kids crying about something that probably does not matter. It is funny to say out loud, but the truth is that most parents worth their salt know the difference between their kids crying for some ridiculous reason and when they cry because they are near to death. I think there is something spiritual I could say about this, but I will let you fill in the blank on this one.
Seriously though, noise from your kids becomes static on a radio station that is playing your favorite song. You just keep driving. Am I right?
It’s not so much this white noise that has disturbed me recently, but an awareness of gross, self-centered yelling matches in western societies that makes my stomach turn. It is all the yelling about stuff that we really do not care that much about. We just do not want to be the one in the corner not saying anything so we try to match our volume with somebody else’s outrage.
We get on soapboxes and we crown ourselves alongside the worst kind of drama queens in society. I am not sure there is an ounce of difference between our rants on social media and a two year old throwing a fit because they wanted the “blue” one and not the “green” one.
Maybe your mind is racing back to someone in High School or maybe it’s not. It might be a red flag to our maturity when we realize how often we work to teach a toddler to stop doing the same exact thing. It turns my stomach to think about how attention-loving individuals suck the life out of a situation and manipulate everything in the orbit to gravitate towards them. Have you ever worked in that office or been at that party when this sort of glory thievery has taken place? It attempts to rob G-d whether its a conscious decision or not. It is an attention grab from a place of desperation. It is a fake existence often laced with lies.
There is only one Person who happens to be the center of the universe, and you are not Him. Repeat that a few times to yourself.
This is not to say that I am not against people or things getting attention. I just think it saddens me to notice that when we are raising our voice for EVERY cause, that we slowly become essentially a people who raise our voice for NO cause. We want others to think we have the same convictions, but it betrays to our onlookers just the opposite. We are just co-signing on what others are doing for sometimes good and sometimes evil reasons. We put the weight of our voice behind whatever is trending without questioning the motives of who is asking for our support. Not only that but we are exhausting our hearers. We gripe about Texas sports and abortion and somebody else’s politics and what Kanye said and how we had to wait in line at Starbucks… at essentially the same volume.
We are flooding a world with more noise even though it is already drowning in information.
The thing I have noticed about social media and the Internet is that it allows me to be constantly outraged about things of which I may be minimally informed regarding their context. All you need to do to create a great meme is to cook up a half-truth from an issue that is out of context and pair it with a witty image.
The dishonesty of this type of social activism is that it costs me virtually nothing. It does not demand me to think below the surface. It requires zero sweat equity. I can protest without any risk of martyrdom. It requires no blood. I can throw my voice at a range of issues, while living like a hypocrite when I stand up and walk away from the computer screen. Nobody is holding me accountable to live my opinions that I drop on a comments section. The Internet has created the best form of hypocrisy. The way of Jesus has always demanded more.
It has always changed more than just the surface. It is less about reciting catch phrases at the top of our voice than it is about taking up a cross and following Jesus (who is at times a little hard to keep up with). The ‘retweet’ allegiance or the sacrament of the ‘share’ is not holy enough for us. There is too much that is disingenuous about it. It’s not the whole show, even if it feels good to vent it in the moment. Your soul knows better and longs for more. It needs more than just the repeating of complaints; it needs the authentic syncing of life and words that cannot be done without grace.
It needs a Jesus that can narrow our two faces down to just one.
You would be encouraged to know that there is a level of intellectual fulfillment in Christ that is infinitely superior to the political rhetoric you might be hearing. Beloved, do not forget who bought your voice on the cross. As the yelling matches go nuclear like an arms race from the eighties, it might be wise for us to stop and consider before we jump on any bandwagon offering us a ride.
Maybe it is time that we become the first to pause before we lend our voices to a particular cause or movement that doesn’t have Jesus at the center. Maybe it is time to narrow our vision and harmonize our voices to the things that matter most.
As I have walked with Christ for more than a minute, I have realized there is ferocity for sports teams that my heart just no longer deems worthy. I love sports and see them as a gift from G-d to my existence that leads me to worship Him. It is just that I want to raise my voice loudest when it counts the most, and be comfortable saving my voice for the things that matter the least to eternity. I want to raise my voice to point people away from sin and to the greatest joy the universe has to offer: Jesus. I want to use my sound waves well.
I want to be a walking announcement of His grace.
I want to give my loudest cries for the Gospel and be perfectly okay with falling silent on a million other things that matter way less. I just do not want to silence my love for Jesus by simply letting it get lost among my other opinions on lesser matters. It doesn’t have to be cool; it just has to be clear. Honestly, it will never be cool, but if it’s clear it can change the world. A simple thought came to me the other day, and it is this: 10 out of 10 people, who are not given an invitation to follow Jesus, don’t. Every single one without an invitation does not come. A perfect hundred percent fail rate. This isn’t a matter of missing, but of never actually taking a shot. What struck me further, as I meditated on this reality, is that I cannot win people to everything that I love. Some will never like my music, or cheer for my team, or hold my particular political perspective, but they can meet my Savior.
If they never see things the way I do, but they see HIM, then it is enough. On the other hand, if they held my convictions on all other matters, but didn’t know my King, then I would weep.
Sometimes G-d turns up the pain in order to get us to raise our voice to something that is wrong. He uses all things to set our priorities straight. I can testify over and again that He is good like that. It is not strange to the Bible for Christians to harmonize their voices with other believers to make a chorus for the things worth filling our lungs for. This brief pause in writing has been like a deep breath before a high note. It has been a sacred pause to listen and reflect about where I want to give my energy.
I pray that if you are drowning in noise that Jesus would be your silence, that He would be your refuge. I hope your find new space to meet with Him. I hope it’s the kind of rendezvous that reorients your life to the things that matter. It may rescue you from the new kind of hypocrisy or the old kind of idolatry, but it will be something worth talking about.
Bon Courage.
