In Luke 9, Jesus says, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Plowing requires a single-minded focus) and when talking to Martha, in Luke 10, he says, “You are anxious and worried about many things. There is only one thing needful”.
As Christians, we are vulnerable to “weapons of mass distraction” which aim to take out the primary focus of our lives. In the situation, that we currently find ourselves in, the major tactical weapon unleashed against us is the artillery of “elegant ambiguity”, whose purpose is to disorient us, by generating random noise.
I live down the road from what was the VCS Halifax Marine radio station. Whose function was to monitor the marine frequencies for distress calls, from ships at sea. In the world of the marine radio operator, your ears were presented with two things: the morse code signal and the atmospheric static, signal and noise. Sometimes the signal to noise ratio was extremely low, so that to the untrained ear it was all just static. The signal was buried in the all the extraneous noise. I have been to the station on a stormy night and heard nothing but static, but a trained operator, can detect a morse code signal when the signal to noise ratio is down in the 1:100 range. Their listening skill is literally the source of salvation for those sailors in peril on the sea!
In Luke 8:18, Jesus says, “So pay attention to how you hear” and in Romans 10:17 St. Paul says, “So faith comes by hearing”. Like a professional radio operator, honing our hearing needs to be part of developing our ongoing skill set. Our spiritual livelihood and the lives of others depend on it.
Static is not “static”, it can move around the spectrum. Frequencies that, in the past, have had a good signal to noise ratio, can flip with changes in the atmospherics, the powers of the air. In this new environment, it can take quite a lot of focus to be able to still hear that “still small voice” calling out to using the midst of all the noisy spirits of confusion that are attempting to drown it out.
Photo credit: Rob Flickenger, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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