Twitterings...

Now this post is going to make me feel incredibly middle-aged, however I feel the need to write it. Yesterday I took a trip to the land of Tibbles, Oxenton, which is a very pretty little village out in the sticks wherrrrre theyyy eat muddd and celebrate manurrrrrrre. Well, something like that. I arrived a little ahead of Helen, Hannah and Ruth, so stood outside for a while.

It was then that I noticed something strange, or rather, a lack of something, making it strange! My ears felt as though a little sound module (like the mechanism for a musical birthday card) containing noises such as ambulance sirens (every 10-20 minutes), cars (constantly), front doors banging and flat dwellers' noise (constantly), snippets of strange conversations passing the window (periodically), technological buzzings (constantly), the red helicopter (at least once a day), chav stereos (too often) etc etc had ben removed from my ears!

I get so used to this fuzzy mulch that they call 'noise' that I don't so much notice the noise, only the lack of it when it is not there. This place was beautifully silent and I heard a sound that I had not heard for a long long time. Birds singing. Not just one, but lots of different birds with different tunes. Being slightly musically minded, I appreciate birdsong, because it is always tuneful (apart from maybe seagulls!), always harmonious and always beautiful. You could write a whole symphony based on copying their sound!

It made me think of why Jesus retreated to the quiet places. When the world is full of noise it is little wonder that we cannot hear God's voice clearly. You can be sitting in our flat waiting for a divine revelation which ends up as something like this: "Lord, what would you say to that person right now?" ...................."SCREEEEEEEECHHHHHHHHHHHHH I like, big, BUTTS and I cannot lie...." .... "er, no, sorry Lord, misheard you there I think... Any insight?" *drunken neighbour trips over the stairs and slams his door* This is the point where if you could adopt that MSN emoticon face that looks like this :-S then you would.

The silence was like drinking cold water on a boiling hot day, it was life-giving! I realised that I need to get somewhere quiet to spend some time with God. It is no wonder that Helen is so good at this. I believe Art Garfunkel wrote 'the sound of silence'... It is hard to describe!