Stop the Noise!

I added the following quote to my quote file on January 16, 2017.

Now, almost 10-years later, it has only grown worse. The issue of how to deal with the “flood-driven Niagara of raw, uninterpreted information and emotion that pounds down on us by the minute” has been a frequent topic of thought and study of mine. (For a recent example, see Stop Listening, Start Thinking: A Guide.)

My goal? I will not be conformed to this world! (Romans 12:2).

How to achieve my goal? Build, maintain, and live under – what I call – a Dome of Silence where I carefully curate what I allow to have my time and attention.

I hope you will join me.

From: Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times, by Os Guinness

“If the danger of the tyranny of numbers was evident in the nineteenth century, how much more so is it today. We are in the age of gargantuan numbers, truly instant information, ceaselessly hyperactive social media, when the World Wide Web has become a flood-driven Niagara of raw, uninterpreted information and emotion that pounds down on us by the minute with its ceaseless roar and its drenching deluge.

Who can hear themselves think, let alone make sense of it all with genuine reflection and seasoned judgments? No wonder it is tempting to give up and go with the flow, rushing along with the crowds and sweeping past the best as we chase after the most. It is all too easy to get caught up in the sensational and forget the significant.

Those who make this mistake miss the important for the urgent and become attuned to popular approval rather than divine authority. They count opinions rather than weigh them. The imprimatur they covet is to be called “in,” “cool,” “relevant,” or better still, one of “the hundred most influential” or part of a new “emerging majority.” For heaven’s sake, read anything and everything that is “in” at the present moment. But we must pray always and unceasingly that we are never, God forbid, “out of fashion” or fear being caught on “the wrong side of history.”

The ONE THING for today: Do not be confused by and guided by the noise of this world. (It is virtually all noise.) Live under a Dome of Silence.