Spiritual Hearing

From endless traffic to nonstop construction, if you live in a busy city, the noise is inescapable. Research has meticulously analyzed 11 key factors to map out the noisiest corners of the United States. From the constant hum of commuter traffic, to population density, to proximity to airports, and construction noise, the study paints a vivid picture of how urban density transforms our environment — and often leaves our ears ringing.

The survey finds nothing beats the racket taking place in the loudest state in the country, New Jersey! New Jersey takes the title thanks to its 1,267 residents packed into every square mile and a mind-boggling 50,374 vehicles traversing every square mile of road each day. Nearly 14,567 flights annually add to the sonic assault.

To put Jersey’s noise level into context, researchers gave the state a noise score of 52.87. That was more than 10 points more than the number two state on the list, Massachusetts (41.31).

Rounding out the top five are Pennsylvania (3rd), Florida (4th), and the tiny state of Rhode Island (5th). At the opposite end of the noise spectrum, other states offer a reprieve from the urban cacophony. Specifically, Alaska ranked as the quietest state in the U.S. (8.02), followed by Minnesota (49th) and Montana (48th). With minimal population density and limited air traffic, these states provide a sanctuary of silence.

While the study provides a fascinating look at noise levels, it also raises important questions about the potential health impacts of constant urban sound. As cities continue to grow and infrastructure expands, the battle against noise pollution becomes increasingly critical.

You are in a coffee shop, meeting with a friend over steaming lattes. While you are talking, your conversation partner seems engaged: They hold your gaze, smile at the funny parts, and nod warmly. You think they are a good listener, and you are excited to see them again soon. However, were they really listening? If you probed their mind during the conversation, what were they actually attending to and thinking about? Were they really listening attentively, or just creating the impression of good listening?

According to one recent study, we our attention wanders about 25% of the time. The researchers concluded:

“Speakers consistently overestimated their conversation partners’ attentiveness—often believing their partners were listening when they were not. Our results suggest this overestimation is (at least partly) due to the largely indistinguishable behavior of inattentive and attentive listeners. It appears that people can (and do) divide their attention during conversation and successfully feign attentiveness.”

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Listening to others—paying attention. (2) Listening to God—how often does our mind wander in our prayer life? (3) God listening to us—he never fails to hear us.

Do you occasionally find yourself waking up at 3am, going over embarrassing memories, or having a cringe attack, and begin picking on yourself?

According to a psychology researcher specializing in sleep, the 3am wake-up call often coincides with a surge of negative self-talk. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as "barbed-wire thinking." It’s not just you, but is shared by many people and can be particularly distressing due to the vulnerable state we find ourselves in during the early morning hours.

Research suggests that around 3 or 4am, our bodies experience a natural shift in sleep patterns. Core body temperature begins to rise, sleep drive diminishes, melatonin secretion peaks, and cortisol levels increase in preparation for the day ahead. While we may awaken multiple times throughout the night, the combination of stress and the unique physiological factors present during this specific sleep phase can often lead to increased awareness of these awakenings.

At this point in the sleep cycle, we are both physically and mentally at our lowest ebb. Our internal resources are depleted, making it challenging to cope with negative emotions or thoughts. Additionally, the lack of social connections, cultural support, and problem-solving skills typically available during the day exacerbates our vulnerability.

Furthermore, the solitude and quiet of the early morning can contribute to a heightened sense of self-focus. Without external distractions, it's easy to become engrossed in negative thoughts and emotions, such as guilt, regret, or fear.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Besides the natural circadian rhythm that explains early morning “barbed-wire thinking” early morning can be a time of heightened spiritual awareness, both positive and negative. 1) Experiencing God - God can more easily speak to us at night when we are not distracted by busyness; 2) Spiritual Warfare - Satan can take advantage of our vulnerable state and use this time to attack us to cause us shame and guilt involving past actions and memories.

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.

If you are heading into Manhattan off the George Washington Bridge, you can't miss the cluster of four 32-story apartment buildings built right over the interstate. 300,000 cars go whizzing underneath the buildings each day. This makes the bridge the nation’s busiest crossing.

Built in 1964, the Apartments were to be a shining monument to efforts in easing New York's chronic housing shortage. But almost immediately, the development was controversial; people worried that the exhaust from the traffic might be a health hazard to the residents.

Researchers began going floor-to-floor, checking on the well-being of school children who lived in the Apartments. Something was definitely going on. The kids living on the lower floors had lower reading scores than the children who lived on the buildings' higher floors. In fact, it was a linear relationship: the lower the floor of the child's apartment, the lower their reading scores.

But wait—further research showed it wasn't the exhaust pollution. It was noise pollution. The children in the lower levels were exposed to exponentially more traffic noise. All day, everyday, the kids heard the endless honking of horns, the screeching of brakes, and the continuous roar of hundreds of thousands of engines zooming by. Kids learned to block out all the sounds of traffic so well that they pretty much started to block out everything (even the good "noise").

None of these kids had hearing problems: all the kids had hearing tests, and they sailed right through. Cornell professor Gary Evans said that the answer is as simple as this: "The kids began to tune the noise out." The kids became too good at blocking noise, they tuned out all noise, including speech.

Trying to remedy the situation, the school installed some sound-absorbent panels at the ceiling. The paneling only reduced the volume by 5 dB. It was still awfully loud. But it was enough of a difference that the following year's preschoolers outperformed their predecessors. Their teachers reported that the kids were speaking in more complete sentences. They understood more of what was being spoken to them, and they were better understood by others.

But even with this research, it took until 2004 for the managers of the apartments to take action and install noise-minimizing double-pane glass windows.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This could be used as a good reminder of how much "good" can get lost in today's cacophony of “noise” of TikTok, social media, commercials, text messages, phone notifications, and the noise surrounding everyday life. We scarcely have any quiet times to meditate on God’s Word and to pray, or have a quiet conversation with a good friend.

Eduardo Rocha shares his dramatic testimony in an issue of CT magazine:

It was March 13, 1986, I was all alone and getting high. But I had also gotten drunk on fantasies of somehow becoming a drug kingpin at age 18. Earlier that night, I had left my brother’s house to deliver 4.5 ounces of cocaine to one of his customers. I hadn’t noticed the headlight out on Dad’s 1978 Plymouth Volare, but the New York state trooper sure did. After pulling me over, he also noticed that I was driving under the influence, not to mention the lump protruding from the left pocket of my leather jacket.

I was young and naïve, clueless about what lay ahead. But the stark reality caught up with me later as I sat in a cold cell at the Orange County Jail, where I wrapped a bed sheet from an old cot around my neck and began tightening it. Death seemed like the only way out of this mess. I was trapped. Hopeless. Finished.

As the sheet got tighter, the world started fading away. But just before succumbing to the darkness, I heard a voice in my native Spanish: “Eduardo, no lo hagas. Hay esperanza para tu vida.” (“Eduardo, don’t do it. There is hope for your life.”) That sweet, soft voice saved my life that day. After hearing the voice that stopped me from killing myself, I said, “God, if that’s really you, please help me.”

Eduardo was facing a sentence of 15 years to life in prison. When a guard gave him a Bible, he started reading the Gospels. He was captivated by the stories of Jesus—how he would speak to people in great need and meet those needs in miraculous ways. But the verse that made the deepest impression was 2 Corinthians 5:17, where Paul promises that “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” And so, at a church meeting in the jail’s gymnasium, on October 6, 1986, he surrendered to the love of Christ, accepting his offer to be his Lord and Savior.

In a sequence of seemingly miraculous events, his sentence was reduced and he became eligible for parole after just three years. In March of 1989, Eduardo was released but he was immediately taken into custody by an immigration official. He was deported back to Uruguay (where he had been born) and banned from returning.

Over the next 21 years Eduardo never gave up his goal of returning to the US. While he waited, he attended Bible college and began preaching. He married and started a family, but the US Embassy in Uruguay denied his repeated requests to immigrate to the US. Finally, after writing an extensive letter to the US attorney general, he received a pardon from the State Department and a tourist visa was approved.

He returned to the United States in 2010, and connected with a church near Nashville. In 2012, this church hired him as the pastor of an on-campus Hispanic church. Over time the Tennessee Department of Correction hired him to serve as psychiatric chaplain in a maximum-security prison.

In January of 2022, God finally granted my fervent wish for full US citizenship. That sweet voice that cared enough to whisper encouragement into my prison cell still cares deeply for me now. Life has not been easy, but I have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, even to those who make terrible mistakes like mine.

Editor’s Note: Today Eduardo Rocha is a corporate chaplain for Charter Construction in Tennessee and a military chaplain for the Tennessee State Guard.

In 1801, at the age of 30, Ludwig van Beethoven complained about his diminishing hearing: “From a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices.”

Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks notes that Beethoven “raged” against his decline. To be able to hear his own playing, he banged on pianos so forcefully that he often left them wrecked. By the age 45, he was completely deaf. He considered suicide but was held back only by the force of “moral rectitude.”

Cut off from the world of sound around him … at times he held a pencil in his mouth against his piano’s soundboard to feel the harmony of his chords. However, Beethoven produced the best music of his career, culminating in his incomparable Ninth Symphony, a composition so daringly new that it reinvented classical musical altogether.

Brooks wrote, “It seems a mystery that Beethoven became more original and brilliant as a composer in inverse proportion to his ability to hear. Deafness freed Beethoven as a composer because he no longer had society’s soundtrack in his ears.”

There are multiple lessons lurking in this tale. Most striking was the degree to which silence paradoxically allowed Beethoven to hear something new. In our current techno-cultural moment, we’re constantly connected to a humming, online, hive-mind of urgency. Sometimes, there’s long-term advantage in removing “society’s soundtrack” from our ears. As Beethoven so vividly demonstrates, we can’t really hear ourselves until we are able to turn down the volume on everyone else.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The same is true for the believer, you can’t really hear God until we turn down the deafening volume of the world. In his grace, God may take something from us in order to turn our attention fully to him.

Mark Batterson describes the amazing ability of the human ear in his book Whisper:

The act of hearing is detecting vibrations of the eardrum caused by sound waves, and the intensity of those waves is measured in decibels. On one end of the sound spectrum is the sperm whale, the loudest animal on earth. The clicking noise it uses to echolocate can hit 200 decibels. Even more impressive, researchers believe that whale songs may travel up to ten thousand miles underwater! Next to the sperm whale is jet engines (150 decibels), air horns (129 decibels), thunderclaps (120 decibels), and jackhammers (100 decibels).

What's on the other end of the sound spectrum?

A whisper, measuring just 15 decibels.

Technically speaking, our absolute threshold of hearing is 0 decibels. That corresponds to a sound wave measuring 0.0000002 pascals, which causes the eardrum to vibrate by just 108 millimeters. That's less than a billionth of the ambient pressure in the air around us and smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom!

The President of the U.S. has the power to push text messages to just about every smartphone in America, anytime he deems it necessary. Who knew? The Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system was born of President Bush's frustration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response during Hurricane Katrina, and has morphed since. If you've ever received one of these alerts, it was probably about a missing child Amber alert or a severe weather warning.

But buried in the documents describing its function is this fact: The President of the United States can mass-message the entire phone-carrying nation at the same time whenever he deems it necessary. Oddly enough, if you do get a presidential emergency alert and you're on the phone, it won't show up until after you've finished your conversation. I guess the apocalypse can wait?

Preaching Angle: This illustrates the profound truth that God is in instantaneous and personal contact with every believer, at any time, under any circumstances, by his Spirit.

Doctors warn that a steady onslaught of loud noise, particularly through ear buds, is damaging the hearing of a generation wired for sound, although they may not realize it for years. More than 1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss because of personal audio devices, such as smartphones, and damaging levels of sound at entertainment venues like electronic dance music festivals, where noise levels can top 120 decibels for hours, according to the World Health Organization.

"Probably the largest cause [of hearing damage] is millennials using earbuds and [smartphones]," says Dr. Sreekant Cherukuri, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Hearing loss among today's teens is about 30 percent higher than in the 1980s and 1990s, Cherukuri estimates.

"You (once) had a Walkman with two AA batteries and headphones that went over your ears," he told NBC News. "At high volume, the sound was so distorted and the battery life was poor. Nowadays, we have smart phones that are extremely complex computers with high-level fidelity."

The damage happens when sound travels from the earbud deep inside your ear to the cochlea, where some 20,000 hair cells transmit the sound to the brain. But if the sound is too loud, and listened to for too long, it can damage those hair cells, or worse, cause them to die off. Permanent damage can happen in minutes, experts say.

Possible Preaching Angles: Physical hearing loss is a serious situation, but spiritual hearing loss is devastating. Will anyone in the wired generation be able to hear the voice of God amidst the constant barrage of noise?

In1973 the journal Science published an article titled "On Being Sane in Insane Places." It described an experiment in which eight "fake" patients with no history of mental illness went undercover and checked themselves into a few psychiatric hospitals across the United States. All of them had the same complaint: they told medical staff that they regularly "heard voices." Apart from this fabrication they behaved normally and recounted their own (normal) past experiences and medical histories.

Nonetheless, all of them were diagnosed as schizophrenic (except one, who was diagnosed with "manic-depressive psychosis"), hospitalized for up to two months, and prescribed antipsychotic medications (which they did not swallow). Once admitted to the mental wards, they continued to speak and behave normally; they reported to the medical staff that their hallucinated voices had disappeared and that they felt fine. They even kept notes on their experiment, quite openly (this was registered in the nursing notes for one of the fake patients as "writing behavior").

This experiment, designed by David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist and one of the fake patients, found that the single symptom of "hearing voices" could suffice for an immediate, categorical diagnosis of mental illness even in the absence of any other symptoms or abnormalities of behavior. In other words, "hearing voices" could only have one explanation—you're crazy.

Possible Preaching Angles: Of course mental illness is a reality, but at times smart people in our society are quick to judge that Christians who hear from God are also crazy or deluded.

Three friends decided to go deer hunting together: a lawyer, a doctor, and a preacher. As they were walking, along came a big buck. The three of them shot simultaneously. Immediately the buck dropped to the ground and all three rushed up to see how big it actually was. Upon reaching it they couldn't determine whose shot had actually killed the deer.

As a heated debated ensued, a few minutes later a game officer came by and asked what the problem was. The doctor told him that they were debating who shot the buck. The officer took a look at the buck and within a few seconds, he said with much confidence, "The preacher shot the buck!" They all wondered how he knew that so quickly. The officer said, "Easy. The bullet went in one ear and out the other."

Possible Preaching Angle: Although this joke may gently make fun of preachers, it actually illustrates a more serious challenge to all of us. Namely, as we listen to God's Word (as we read it or hear it preached), do we allow God's message for us to go in one ear and out the other? Do we hear God's Word without allowing it to transform us?

A concerned husband goes to see the family doctor: "I think my wife is deaf. She never hears me the first time I say something. In fact, I often have to repeat things over and over again."

"Well," the doctor replies, "go home tonight, stand about 15 feet from her, and say something. If she doesn't reply, move about five feet closer and say it again. Keep doing this so we can get an idea of the severity of her deafness."

Sure enough, the husband goes home, and he does exactly as instructed. He stands about 15 feet from his wife, who is standing in the kitchen, chopping some vegetables.

"Honey, what's for dinner?"

He gets no response, so he moves about five feet closer and asks again.

"Honey, what's for dinner?"

No reply.

He moves five feet closer, and still no reply.

He gets fed up and moves right behind her—about an inch away—and asks one final time, "Honey, what's for dinner?"

She replies, "For the fourth time, vegetable stew!"

Those who listen with eyes, face, and heart, as well as mind, never lack people who will beat a path to their ears.

I have often learned much more in one prayer than I have been able to glean from much reading and reflection.

God speaks to us not only once in a while, but always.

God always answers us in the deeps, never in the shallows of our soul.

If we think we hear something from God that is already a heartfelt yearning of our own, a warning light should flash: This needs extra verification!

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.