Noise

What’s on Megan’s Mind?

I once went on a silent retreat, which is an odd thing for a Pentecostal to do. I was 6 months pregnant with my first child, and my best friend from college had become (I kid you not) a cloistered nun at a monastery in rural Kentucky. She was five years into her time there, and I was three years into my marriage, and we communicated only by exchanging letters. “Cloistered” means that the Sisters interact as little as possible with the outside world, so there were no phone calls and very few opportunities to see each other. I visited her there on two occasions before–once with her family during the monastery’s pre-approved Family Week, and then once to hear her Profession of Vows (aka Nun Wedding– Catholicism is mysterious, ya’ll). 

I’m not here to fight with anyone about the virtue or value of an Apostolic spending a week in a Catholic monastery–I felt confident enough in my doctrine to know that I wasn’t going to come out of the retreat professing Catholicism. I wanted to see my best friend one more time, before I became a mother and our paths irrevocably branched into lives so different they’d never be comparable again. I wanted to spend some time in the quiet, with my thoughts, and hear from God because there would be nothing else to hear, or so I hoped. 

I spent the week praying and doing puzzles and eating simple meals in a silent dining hall where all the seats faced a window, outside of which were some hummingbird feeders. I read a lot of C.S. Lewis and sat in a too-quiet church and asked God hard questions about parenting, and got very few answers. Mostly, I just soaked in the quiet. 

That experience was transformative for me, not because something amazing happened while I was there–it was impactful because it has provided such a stark, vivid contrast to the insanity of day-to-day life outside of the monastery. During my time there I had a simple routine that was grounded around corporate prayers, mealtimes, and recreation hours. My biggest decisions were things like: “Will I eat a boiled egg today, or not?” “Will I take the longer walking path, or the shorter one?” “What book will I read next?” I allowed myself to be bored. I didn’t use my phone (there was no wifi available and I had horrible signal, so this was a great motivator). I sat in front of windows and watched hummingbirds, and thought about the future and my baby and my marriage and God and evangelism and the end of the world and the desires of my heart and how it must have felt for Mary to sit at the feet of her suffering baby and hope that he would return, somehow. I only used my voice to talk to the Lord. Its sound became oddly unfamiliar.

I did hear from God, in some small ways that I come back to once in a while, but there were no thunderclaps from heaven. I do think that if every day were that devoid of noise, my prayer life would be so much richer. But, dear reader, there is only noise in my life, most of the time. From the moment I returned from that retreat, the noise of my job, of my family, of my responsibilities, of social media and the news and the culture and the world crowded in. There is so. Much. Noise. Some we’re accosted with unwillingly and some we mainline into our brains through our scrolling fingertips and hungry eyeballs. Even if we only focus on the noise we hear regarding love and relationships, the whine of it is constant. My six year-old came home from school this week and told me that two of her first grade friends were dating, and someone else had a crush on her. So it begins. 

It is so hard for us to separate ourselves from the noise and think, I mean really think about what we care about and who we love and the kind of Christian we want to become. I had to pay a lot of money and travel to rural Kentucky to experience that luxury for a few days, and while I delighted in seeing my friend for a brief moment (the nuns allowed us to sit in the same room for an hour) it was ultimately a very light and overpriced taste of quiet. The truth is: most of us will never get a full day of noiselessness, where we are alone with our thoughts. Some of us would find that experience terrifying, justifiably so. Complete silence is something precious, to be consumed in small portions, like fancy chocolate or caviar or the sweet bit at the end of a honeysuckle flower.

I wouldn’t recommend flying across the country to sit in a silent dining hall and watch hummingbirds, but I would suggest taking a moment (just a moment–not a whole terrifying week) to put away all of the devices and think about the following:

• What would I know about love and marriage if I only learned about it from the Bible?

• Who taught me what ‘attraction’ meant? Who taught me what ‘pursuit’ meant? Are they people that I would pick to be my teachers?

• Who would I be attracted to if I were blind? 

• What will matter to me when I am at the end of my life with just that other person I’ve chosen?

• How will my marriage make me more like God? 

Interestingly, reader–my friend eventually left the monastery. I wish I could say it was because the voice of the Lord came to her and helped her see Truth, but the real story is that there was harmful noise working its way into her life even in that silent place. I’m still hopeful for her. She did get to meet my children, and while I wouldn’t call us best friends anymore, she is one of my cherished people. I wish her experiences had been different, but I’m grateful that through her I was able to immerse myself in near noiselessness for a moment, if only so I can recognize when I’m most in need of it now. 

I hope you enjoy a moment of quiet today, and maybe see a hummingbird.

Sincerely, and with love,

–Megan

Resources

If you have never read C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, I highly recommend it. It’s a short book that is told sort of like a parable, but consists of a conversation between a senior and a lesser demon, who are conniving together to destroy the life of a young Christian man. Through this well-written set of mental gymnastics, Lewis asks the reader to consider what Hell’s agenda is for our own lives and relationships, and provides some great tips for how to ruin that plan.

Announcements

For this week, I’m giving myself a break from providing you with a pipeline update–frankly, my pipeline tool looks like a filing cabinet that was picked up by a tornado and dropped in the neighboring state. Intake from the August sale wraps up in the next week or so, and my schedule is finally beginning to return to some form of normal. I, however, am nowhere close to being back to normal, so patience and prayers are appreciated! We’ve upped our headcount of men and women since I last wrote, but I need to actually go get all of my ducks in a row before I’ll be confident in my numbers. I’ve learned some lessons about this intake season, namely:

• 20 hours of consultations in a normal work week is too many

• I need more than one bathroom break in a 9 hour consultation Saturday (sorry to those whose consultations were interrupted by that issue)

• I should probably pause attempting to do matching during intake season. I had to sheepishly email the handful of matches that have been waiting on me to schedule their dates and write their bios and ask them to give me another week or two to get my life together. 

Steven has (very sweetly, in his kind, golden-retrieverish way) sat me down and told me that I’m not allowed to do this to myself again. I agreed. Thanks for hanging with us as we figure all of this craziness out. We’re making forward progress, even when it seems like we’re just treading water. 

Hey Single Friend, 

Welcome to Love Notes! I’m so excited that you’re here. If you’re new: Love Notes are weekly updates from Megan, designed to give you a boost of encouragement and keep you looped in on all of the happenings at The Synchrony Project. These are always written straight from my heart, never with AI.