Silence in a Culture of Hot Takes

Part 5 of the Lenten Series: The Season We’d Rather Skip

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Everybody has an opinion about everything now. And not just an opinion but an urgent, fully formed, publicly stated opinion that needs to be shared within the first fifteen minutes of any event happening anywhere in the world. A politician says something controversial and within seconds your feed is a wall of hot takes. A celebrity makes a statement and suddenly everyone you know is a cultural commentator. A tragedy happens and before the facts are even clear there are already a thousand threads telling you exactly what it means and who is to blame and what you should think about it.

We are drowning in words. And I don’t think most of us realize how much it’s costing us.

I read somewhere recently that the average American consumes somewhere around thirty-four gigabytes of information per day. I don’t even know what that means exactly but it sounds like way too much. We wake up and reach for the phone before our feet hit the floor. We fill the car with podcasts. We scroll through lunch. We fall asleep to Netflix. Every available moment of silence gets stuffed with content and noise and opinion and commentary until there is literally no space left in the day where we are just quiet. Just still. Just existing without someone else’s words in our heads.

And the church has bought into this completely. Pastors feel the pressure to make public statements about every cultural moment within hours of it happening. If you don’t post your take fast enough, people assume you either don’t care or you’re on the wrong side. Social media has turned ministry into a never-ending press conference where silence is interpreted as complicity and thoughtfulness is mistaken for cowardice. The hot take has replaced the sermon as the primary unit of pastoral communication and I think we’ve lost something enormous in the exchange.

My Commute

This Lent I made a commitment that sounded simple and turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while. I decided to drive to and from work in complete silence. No podcasts. No music. No phone calls. No audiobooks. Just me and the road and thirty minutes of nothing each way.

The first few days were brutal. I’m not exaggerating. The silence felt physically uncomfortable, like an itch I couldn’t scratch. My hand kept reaching for the phone. My brain kept racing to fill the gap with something, anything, because apparently I have trained myself over the years to be incapable of sitting in a quiet car without external stimulation. That realization alone was worth the experiment.

But somewhere around the end of the first week something started to shift. The noise in my head began to quiet down. Not all at once and not completely, but enough that I started to notice things I hadn’t noticed before. Ideas I didn’t know I was carrying. Convictions I’d been too busy to feel. Creative thoughts that had been waiting patiently for a gap in the noise to slip through. Some mornings the Holy Spirit showed up in that silence in ways that genuinely surprised me. Not in a dramatic, clouds-parting kind of way. More like a quiet nudge. A thought I didn’t generate on my own. A gentle correction I probably would have missed if I’d had a podcast filling the space instead.

Five hours a week. That’s what an hour of silence a day during the work week adds up to. And I can tell you honestly that those five hours have been more formative than most of the content I’ve consumed in the last year, because it turns out you can’t hear much of anything when you never stop talking.

The Ministry of Shutting Up

James 1:19 might be the most ignored verse in the entire New Testament. “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.” Quick to listen. Slow to speak. Read that again and then open any social media platform and notice how completely we’ve inverted that instruction.

We are quick to speak, slow to listen, and angry about everything all the time.

We have built an entire culture around the exact opposite of what James is telling us to do and then we wonder why everything feels so exhausting and fruitless.

Henri Nouwen understood this. He wrote that “silence is the home of the word” and that “without silence, the word loses its power.” I’ve been sitting with that idea during these quiet commutes and I think he’s right in a way that goes deeper than just personal devotion. Our words have lost their power because we’ve multiplied them beyond all reason. We speak so much and so fast and so constantly that nothing we say carries weight anymore. Everything is content. Everything is a take. Everything is noise piled on top of noise until the signal is completely buried.

Nouwen spent significant time living in monastic communities and what he discovered there wasn’t that monks had figured out how to escape the world. It was that they had figured out how to be present in it. Silence wasn’t just the absence of something, it was the presence of something. It was the space where God’s voice could actually land because someone had finally stopped talking long enough to hear it.

What Silence Isn’t

I want to be careful here because I don’t want to over-spiritualize this. Not every silent commute ends with a divine revelation. Some mornings I just drove to work and thought about what I was going to have for lunch. And that’s fine. Silence doesn’t have to be productive. It doesn’t have to result in a spiritual breakthrough or a creative epiphany or a moment of profound clarity. Sometimes silence is just silence. And in a world that demands constant output and constant engagement and constant noise, just being quiet for thirty minutes is a radical act all by itself.

But I will say this. The days when something does break through are the days that remind me why this matters. There is a version of my life where I fill every available second with sound and stimulation and never once create enough space for God to get a word in. I’ve lived that version. Most of us have. And it’s exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with physical tiredness and everything to do with spiritual depletion.

You can be busy for God and completely deaf to God at the same time.

I know because I’ve done it.

Try This

This week, find your silence. You don’t have to join a monastery or go on a retreat or sit cross-legged on a cushion for an hour. Just pick one space in your day that you normally fill with noise and leave it empty. The commute. The morning coffee. The walk to pick up the kids. Whatever it is, let it be quiet. Don’t fill it. Don’t optimize it. Just sit in it and see what happens when you give your soul a few minutes without words.

You might hear nothing. You might hear everything. Either way, you’ll be practicing something the church has known for two thousand years that our culture has almost entirely forgotten.

Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is close your mouth and open your ears.

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