Quietness

A cafe in Amsterdam is filled with people on a Sunday afternoon, but there’s not a laptop or cellphone in sight. Those meeting are part of the Offline Club, where a Wi-Fi signal is not needed, whose members check their electronics at the door, grab a coffee and a seat, and pretend like it’s the '90s.

Each meeting starts off with quiet time for reading, crafting, or just relaxing with your beverage. Then it becomes social for people who want to engage with others.

Co-founder of the club, Ilya Kneppelhout said, “The Offline Club is a way for people to detox from their rushed daily lives and ever-connected lives with notifications. And it is people who are unhappy with their social media usage or their phone usage and screen time and want to decrease that and get back to real connection."

It’s a simple concept, but participants say they really look forward to it. “You get to be very present in a way you didn’t come in realizing,” one member said. Kneppelhout added, “It felt a bit like traveling in time and made me feel nostalgic about the way bars and cafes used to be. Because nowadays, those are places we’re only going to with friends and people we already know and spend time doing digital things like work.”

The founders say they think the concept would work well in other cities, too. “We’re getting together with a franchising concept and we hope to have offline detox events in the entire world for people to reconnect.”

Hidden acoustic wonders called “whispering walls” have awed listeners since ancient times. The field of “archaeo-acoustics” studies the way sound and archaeological sites interact. Cathedrals and capital domes have been noted for the way they capture and amplify sound. A whispering gallery is usually a circular, hemispherical, or elliptical enclosure, often beneath a dome or a vault, in which whispers can be heard clearly in other parts of the gallery.

A whispering gallery allows whispered communication from one part of the internal side of the circumference to another specific part. The sound is carried by waves, known as whispering-gallery waves, that travel around the circumference clinging to the walls. This effect has been discovered in the whispering gallery of St Paul's Cathedral in London, the Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, and Grand Central Station in New York, among others.

When a visitor stands at one focus the sound waves carry the words so that others will be able to hear the whispers from the opposite side of the gallery. Even when the room is filled with many people talking, the whisper can be heard, but only by standing in exactly the right location, others in the room won’t hear the whisper at all.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is possible to hear the slightest whisper spoken in a massive room filled with people, but only when you stand in just the right place. In the same way, in a noisy, bustling world, it is possible to hear the “whisper” of God (1 Kings 19:12), but only if we are standing in the right place of obedience, readiness, and quiet waiting.

Life for a 19th-century sailor was hard: Months at sea were accompanied by constant danger and deprivation. To make matters worse, mariners saw the same few people all day, every day, in a radically confined space where they were expected to get along and look after one another. On a long voyage, one obnoxious person could make life utterly miserable for everyone.

So, sailors used a tried technique to deal with an offender: the silent treatment. They would ignore him completely for weeks on end. That might sound like an innocuous action to you, but in truth, it was far from it. According to author Otis Ferguson (1944), the silent treatment was “a process so effective in the monotony of ship’s life as to make strong men weep.”

Of course, the silent treatment is a technique used not only by sailors. It can be encountered anytime, anywhere, from home to work. You have almost certainly experienced some form of it. Long-married couples will go for days without speaking. A person will give their oldest friend the cold shoulder. A father who refused to speak with his daughter for 30 years.

Silent-treatment inflictors do it because, as the sailors discovered, it was devastatingly effective in imposing pain on the recipient. So much pain, in fact, that it can leave a person scarred and a relationship in ruins.

Given how destructive the silent treatment is, like physical abuse, it can wreck relationships. According to the Gottman Institute, which conducts research on the success and failure of marriages, the act of cutting off your partner by stonewalling can be a contributory factor to divorce.

Possible Preaching Angle:

You have probably inflicted the silent treatment on someone—two-thirds of us have done so. We use it for two main reasons: The most common one is to punish someone for something they said or did. The next most common is conflict avoidance; you might go silent to avoid a major blow-up. But this is not how God intends for his children to relate to others. God intends for us to humble ourselves, take the first step to reconciliation, and begin a conversation without defensiveness or blaming. “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph. 4:26).

Admit it. We’ve all dreamed of escaping our daily routine and walking off into the wilderness to explore the great unknown. The truth is, we all need a bit of time by ourselves every once in a while, and that’s exactly what luxury travel agency Black Tomato are offering.

Their “Get Lost” service is the ultimate trip for anyone looking to get away from it all—especially if your idea of fun is being deposited in the middle of nowhere with only a backpack, a GPS tracker, and a toothbrush. Travelers are then tasked with the daunting job of navigating their way back towards civilization—a challenging but ultimately rewarding experience for those hoping to embrace their inner nomad.

Black Tomato introduced the concept—a kind of a blind date for vacations with “Survivor” elements—in 2017. Cofounder Tom Marchan, who came up with the idea of getting clients “lost,” thought of it as he considered ways to help people truly relax in an age of digital distractions. He said: “Could we create an experience that requires total mental and physical focus? By being totally distracted, it’s almost impossible for them to think about the day-to-day, everything at home.”

With Black Tomato’s guidance, travelers can choose how lost they want to feel, and how surprised they want to be by their destination. In most cases, travelers don’t know where they’re going until they receive flight information; if they fly private, they might step off a plane with no clue where they are.

For Esther Spengler the only requirements she had were going somewhere warm and far away from the United States. Spengler saved up for the 10-day trip to Morocco, which she said cost roughly $13,000. Her adventure began when she flew to Marrakesh and continued by car into the mountains. After a couple of days of training—learning navigation, fire-starting, and how to put up her own shelter—Spengler was on her own for three days.

Despite bloodied toenails and a tricky time setting up her tarp shelter, Spengler was thrilled with the experience. “It turned out really, really incredible and so much more than I could imagine,” she said.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Experiencing God; Trusting God – God often calls us to step out of our comfort zone into unknown territory and trust in him alone—Abraham was called to a place he did not know (Heb. 11:8); Peter was called to step out of the boat and walk on water (Matt. 14:28). 2) Solitude; Seeking God – We also need times of solitude and withdrawal from life’s busyness to focus on God alone (1 Kings 19:12; Psa. 27:8).

The Starbucks at the CIA headquarters is not allowed to take names for orders. It’s not “business as usual” for the Starbucks franchise housed inside the CIA headquarters in Langley, VA. This particular store, code-named “Store Number 1,” operates much differently than their other 12,000+ stores in the U.S.—not surprising when it must accommodate clandestine spymasters working for the most powerful spy organization in the world.

This seller of skinny lattes and double cappuccinos is deep inside the agency’s forested Langley, Va., compound. Because the campus is a highly secured island, few people leave for coffee, and the lines can stretch down the hallway. Welcome to the “Stealthy Starbucks,” as a few officers affectionately call it.

Servers do not ask for the customer’s name (which they normally write on the coffee cup to expedite things), for undercover agents grow uncomfortable when someone asks for it. Even the receipts the baristas hand back have “Store Number 1” cryptically printed on them.

Each barista goes through a robust interview and background check before they are even told that they will be working at the CIA Starbucks. There are nine baristas working there and whenever they leave their work area, a CIA “minder” escorts them. All are regularly briefed about security risks and must report if someone seems overly interested in where they work or asks too many questions about their employment. They can’t even blow their own horns about working inside the CIA at nightclubs or parties and, if asked, can only tell friends, family members and acquaintances that they “work in a federal building.”

One barista said she has come to recognize people’s faces and their drinks. “There’s caramel-macchiato guy” and “the iced white mocha woman,” she said. “But I have no idea what they do. I just know they need coffee, a lot of it.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Compromise; Hiddenness; Light of the World - Agents and even baristas must remain secretive and anonymous at CIA headquarters. But there should be no “undercover Christians” who follow this pattern in their daily lives. Christ wants no hidden Christians; he wants us to shine as lights and be bold and open in our testimony as his followers. 2) Accountability; Secrets; Secrecy – Christians must be open and accountable with one another; there should be no hidden areas of our lives that we conceal while pretending to be godly. 3) Persecution – Some are covert Christians who practice Christianity in secret, often because they fear persecution or discrimination because they live in countries where Christianity is illegal or heavily restricted.

In his book, Paul Gould writes:

The writings of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson are infused with a sacramental theology. Her writing helps us see and savor the divine in the midst of the mundane. In an oft-cited passage, she invites readers to consider the ordinary—in this instance water—from a new vantage point. In her book Gilead, the Congregationalist minister John Ames knows his time on earth is coming to an end, so he writes a series of letters to his young son. Ames shares a memory of an earlier time when he watched a young couple stroll along on a leisure morning:

“The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running. The girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth.”

“I don't know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”

The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station sits upon two miles of glacial ice at the bottom of the world. It is one of the remotest places on the planet, more than 800 miles from the nearest human beings. A small group of 50 to 150 people gather here to support scientific research done by the United States Antarctic Program. Brett Baddorf is one of them, commissioned as a missionary to the others.

Baddorf expected to find that the silence and solitude of the South Pole would deeply rattle his connection with Christ. Instead, he discovered what he now calls "the blessings of solitude":

I should have known better. Christ frequently withdrew to desolate places [like the desert], often at night. So while our environment elicits plenty of side effects and moments of tension over time, Christians especially here have leaned into, instead of away from, the solitude.

None of the Christians here feel called to spend the rest of their lives in the desert (Antarctica is technically a desert, with little precipitation). But it is impossible to deny the benefits of a season set apart. If anything, it would help to remove a few more of the amenities here, at least if a goal of coming to Antarctica were fostering spiritual growth.

In the modern, non-Antarctic world, it can be difficult to find places to be alone. We are surrounded by real and virtual community throughout good portions of our days. When we do need to set apart moments of meditation with our God, knowing how to handle stillness can be almost as challenging as finding it.

Race is the 2016 motion picture about African American athlete Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In one scene, the track team, both white and black athletes, are in the locker room just finishing getting dressed. Coach Larry Snyder is admonishing Owens for losing focus during practice as some of the football players shouted racial slurs. Coach Snyder tells Owens, "You can't get distracted, you understand?"

Then the football team's head coach and some players enter the locker room. The football coach tells Snyder: "All right, Larry. Finish this up now. I got boys who need to shower."

Snyder: "Yeah, one second coach. I'm not quite through yet."

The football coach tells him: "Larry, hustle these niggers out of here. You hear me?"

Snyder ignores him and continues to speak to his team: "If you get your head turned by a few gorillas in warm-up pads here at home, how are you going to hold up in Michigan?"

The football coach and players are offended: "Who's he calling gorillas?" But Snyder keeps ignoring the football team and focusing entirely on his athletes, who are watching the angry football players: "Hey, look at me! A lot of people show up for the Big Ten meet. Not all of them are going to be on our side. You understand? Do you?"

The football coach and his players start yelling louder. Owens and his teammates can't help having their attention switched from their coach to the angry football players and back. Coach Snyder continues, oblivious to the clamor: "You gotta learn to block it all out! It's just noise! That's all this is! All it is, is noise. You hear me? They will love you, or they will hate you. Does not matter. 'Cause either way, when you're out there, you're on your own." He looks directly at Owens. "Jesse! Do you hear me?"

The camera focuses on Owens. After a couple of long seconds the clamor is silenced (signifying the silence inside Owens's mind). Owens says: "Yeah, yeah, Coach. I hear you." A slight, knowing smile is formed on his lips.

"Good. All right, come on. Let's go. You heard (football) Coach. They need the locker room."

Chapter 5: 29 minutes 18 seconds - 30 minutes 23 seconds. (Alert: profanity exactly 5 seconds after end of clip.)

Bryan Stephenson, author of Just Mercy and founder of an organization that tries to help those unjustly convicted of crimes, was trying to free a man who was clearly innocent. About a dozen people had seen him when he allegedly committed the crime, but none of those people were allowed in the courtroom because they were African-Americans. So Stephenson complained to the judge, who reluctantly allowed Stephenson to admit a few of these eyewitnesses.

One older black woman named Mrs. Williams was chosen to represent this group. But there was another big problem: a huge German shepherd stood guard outside the courtroom. When Mrs. Williams, who was deathly afraid of dogs, saw the dog she froze and then her body began to shake. Tears started running down her face before she turned around and ran out of the courtroom.

Later she said, "Mr. Stevenson, I feel so badly, I let you down today. I was meant to be in that courtroom. I should have been in that courtroom." And she started to cry, and I couldn't console her. She said, "I wanted to be in there so bad. But when I saw that dog all I could think about was Selma, Alabama 1965. I remember how they beat us, and I remember the dogs. I wanted to move and I tried to move but I just couldn't do it." And she walked away with tears running down her face.

The next day her sister told Stevenson that Mrs. Williams didn't eat or talk to anybody all night. They just heard her praying all night long the same prayer: "Lord, I can't be scared of no dog. Lord, I can't be scared of no dog." The next morning she walked up to Stevenson and said, "I ain't scared of no dog. I ain't scared of no dog" and then she walked right past that huge German shepherd into the courtroom.

The courtroom was packed when the judge walked in and everybody rose and sat down—except Mrs. Williams. She told the entire courtroom in a loud, firm voice: "I'm here!" But Stevenson said, "What she was saying wasn't that she was physically present. She was saying, I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I am here because I got a vision of justice that compels me to stand up to injustice. And that was when the tide for the case turned.

While elaborating on loving one's neighbor, apologist Michael Ramsden spoke of a colleague who while in Asia asked his audience to close their eyes and imagine peace. After a few seconds the audience was invited to share their mental pictures of peace. One person described a field with flowers and beautiful trees. Another person spoke of snow-capped mountains and an incredible alpine landscape. Still another described the scene of a beautiful, still lake.

After everyone described their mental picture of peace there was one thing common in them all—there were no people in them. Ramsden commented, "Isn't it interesting, when asked to imagine peace the first thing we do is to eliminate everyone else."

Imagine a cell phone free zone. Actually, the United States has such a place. It's called "The Quiet Zone." Anyone driving west from Washington DC towards the Allegheny Mountains will arrive before long in a vast area without mobile phone signals. This is the National Radio Quiet Zone—13,000 square miles of radio silence.

It's designed to protect a sophisticated radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory from interference. The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (or GBT for short) is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope. The energy of Wi-Fi or cell signals can confuse or interfere with the telescope's readings. So a federal quiet zone law and an accompanying state law—the West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zoning Act—combine to keep the area very radio quiet.

Residents within the Quiet Zone live very different lives than most other Americans—no mobile phones, no microwave ovens, and even no wireless doorbells. GBT site director Karen O'Neill says:

We can access the Internet the same as anyone—the difference is that when I leave my desk the Internet doesn't follow me. When I watch a soccer game, every parent on that field is watching the kids playing soccer, nobody is looking at their cell phone, no one is worrying about that. You really don't see that struggle with the parents here where they talk to their kids and say, "You've got to put the phones away," and the kids go, "Do I have to?" and they're sneaking them under the table and doing everything they can to text their friends.

There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us well-nigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God. He is always whispering to us, only we do not always hear, because of the noise, hurry, and distraction which life causes as it rushes on.

—Frederick W. Faber (1814-1863)

A man from Berlin, Germany, took an unusual approach in trying to bring peace to his marriage. CNN reported that the man was using an old air raid siren to stun his wife into submission.

“My wife never lets me get a word in edgeways,” the man identified as Vladimir R. told the police. "So I crank up the siren and let it rip for a few minutes. It works every time. Afterwards, it's real quiet again."

The 73-year-old man's 220-volt rooftop siren was confiscated by police after neighbors filed complaints.

As for his wife of 32 years, she said “My husband is a stubborn mule, so I have to get loud."

How can you expect to keep your powers of hearing when you never want to listen? That God should have time for you, you seem to take as much for granted as that you cannot have time for Him.

Nathaniel Hawthorne described happiness as a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you. And it's like that with the Spirit of God. He is not seized. He is received.

One day I was jogging in the forest near my house when a question popped into my mind: What about John Spurgeon?

I admit, not many people are losing sleep over that question, but I had been reading the autobiography of the famous British preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. I was asking the Lord to bless my ministry like his. And then that question hit me, and I began thinking about John Spurgeon.

Ever heard of him? Until my recent reading, I never had. He was the father of Charles. He was himself a pastor and the son of a pastor. Yet if his son had not achieved such fame as a preacher, John Spurgeon would have served the Lord faithfully, gone to his grave, and we never would have heard of him.

Hundreds of pastors like him have walked with God, shepherded his flock for a lifetime, and gone to their reward without any notice in the sight of the world. As I jogged, I thought, Would I be willing to serve God faithfully and raise up my children to serve him, even if I never achieved any recognition? Even if no one but my own small congregation knew my name?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized, Yes! That's really what I want: to be faithful to the Lord in my personal walk, in my family, and in my shepherding of God's flock.

The Lord never says, "Well done, good and famous servant", but he does say, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

If God makes me as famous as Charles Spurgeon, that's his business. My business is to be as faithful as John Spurgeon.

Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally.

We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen. Even if family, friends, and movies should fail, there is still the radio to fill up the void. ... Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place.