As I filled a prescription earlier this week inside a department store, a motorized cart kept beeping in the distance, indicating that someone was backing up. It went on and on and on. Maybe he or she had a difficult time maneuvering the cart out of a tight spot. But the constant beeping started to rattle my nerves while I stood in line.
The funny thing is, by the time I had my prescription in hand, the beeping continued but I realized I hadn’t heard it for a minute or two. Eventually, I focused on the task at hand by blocking it out.
As someone who is sensitive to noise, this isn’t a new experience for me. We live in a noisy world, both literally and figuratively (everyone wants our attention). There comes a point when you have to plug your ears just so you can think.
“Your brain was literally not created for omniscience,” said Brandon Frias on Instagram. “You’re not meant to know the tragedy of the world, and so learning to reduce your news intake if you want to reduce anxiety in your children will make their world smaller.”
I realize the irony of seeing such a post on Instagram – a platform people use to scream for our attention, but Brandon has a point. I’m not sure where we should draw the line between being an informed citizen and being blissfully uninformed, but I’m guessing it’s not going to either extreme.
On one end of the spectrum, talking heads on radio, podcasts and TV make their living by rallying the troops to grow an audience and subsequent ad revenue. That’s a tad cynical, I know. And I’ll grant you that I believe some genuinely want to inform citizens. But, in reality, too many create parrots who are in a perpetual state of rage, rather than critical thinkers who can offer reasoned responses.
On the other end of the spectrum, I wonder how the church can have anything to say to a culture that it ignores. In Acts 17, the apostle Paul spoke to the Jews in the synagogue and in the marketplace in Athens every day, and then with some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. The gospel Paul shared was strange to their ears. Eventually, he quoted some of their poets to make his spiritual point. And some believed. If he had ignored what their poets wrote, his message might not have landed as hard, at least in the human sense.
So maybe the challenge isn’t to escape the noise entirely but to learn how to listen differently. Like Paul, we can pay attention to the voices around us with the same kind of gospel intentionality without being consumed by them. As we filter the noise through a gospel lens, we can respond with humility and hope.
And if you lean toward blocking everything out, maybe you can ask yourself why you might need to tune in. And then be ready to tune out the rest.
Discerning when to engage and when to step back isn’t just wise but it’s a form of faithfulness in a world that rarely stops beeping.
