Silence

Do you remember what it was like to have a cellphone with a battery that you could remove? This might be before your time, but my first cellphone looked like this:

The cellphone belonged to my dad before I 'inherited' it. Within a month of owning it, I dropped it off the Superman rollercoaster at Six Flags over Texas. That was a fun conversation. Sorry, Dad.

I think cellphones have brought a lot of positive change to the world and our lives, but they’ve also brought us endless notifications. Companies invented strings of sounds that are designed to annoy us into paying attention! A ringing phone is the worst. Most people keep their phone on 'silent', but even silent mode isn’t silent! You can hear someone getting a call from a mile away as their phone rattles against everything in their purse. Phones have brought so much convenience, but they require so much attention.

Constantly buzzing, ringing, beeping: begging for attention. And as noise fills our life, we are all too ready to respond. It’s like we wait for the phone to ring. We are right there when the notifications come, and our life becomes one big reaction. Something happens, and we react. We hear the notification; we swipe. We hear about a problem; we’ve got a solution. Someone needs us; we’re ready to answer. We have become reactors. 

There was a moment in Israel’s history when they were called to do something different. In Exodus 14, Israel has been set free from slavery in Egypt. They were enslaved for four hundred years, and God heard them cry out for freedom and He sent Moses to talk to Pharaoh. You may remember the story: Moses and Pharaoh went back and forth as God sent the plagues. There were frogs, rivers of blood, darkness, a sky full of bugs; eventually Pharaoh let the people of Israel go. He sent them away.

Israel gathered everything up and left. As Moses led the people into the wilderness, Pharaoh realized that he had let this entire population of enslaved people go free, and he changed his mind. He gathered up his army and went after the Israelites.

The Israelites found themselves in a bad place: on the banks of the Red Sea. They had no way to go forward. Pharaoh’s army was barreling towards their position from the back, and the Red Sea in front of them. Look at what happens in Exodus 14:10-12:

“When Pharaoh drew near, the people of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them, and they feared greatly. And the people of Israel cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”

The Israelites freaked out. And rightfully so! The had followed Moses into the wilderness only to discover that Pharaoh was coming after them with a huge army– and they had no army! They were not ready to fight. And they look in front of them and they are pinned in to by the Red Sea. This was a stressful scenario. They could hear the army coming. They all look to Moses for a reaction. What should they do? Listen to what Moses says to them. Exodus 14:13-14:

“And Moses said to the people, “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians who you see today you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.”

What? Moses gives a heroic freedom speech that they are going to be free forever and never see the Egyptians again. Everybody is ready to react, ready to hear the plan, and Moses says: be silent. Stay still. Don’t move. That sounds like the worst advice ever in this moment! If there was ever a moment to get moving it’s now! Don’t you hear what’s happening, Moses?! The army is coming!

But Moses says: you have only to be silent. God will fight for you.

Moses focuses all of Israel back on God. He takes their eyes off of what is happening around them and he points them to God, who will save them. This moment for Israel became a type of national holiday– they continuously looked back at how God provided for them over and over again. And because of this sentence– "be silent," this moment becomes about God’s salvation for them.

So often we are the reactors. Things happen, questions come up, and we’re ready to react. When we get sick, we start googling how to get better. Our kids do something wrong, and we figure out an action plan. Something that we were hoping for falls through, and we decide how we’re going to spin it to our friends. We react.

What if, instead of reacting, our first instinct was to stay silent? What if we trusted that God would provide for us more than we trust ourselves to fix our problems.

Here's a challenge for today: spend more time praying about something bothering you than you spend trying to solve it.