At what volume do you listen to your music? Today as I sat in Zoey’s Coffee Loft I was had my ipod cranked with some ambient, new agey music as I sat and thought, wrote, and became engrossed with myself. I do this often. I rarely pump the volume to it’s limits, but I on most occasions, turn up my music just enough to drown out the world around me. The thought reminds me of a advertisement I saw yesterday for a local newspaper here in Ventura where I am visiting. The ad went like this, “Ventura Newspaper (I forget the real name):It’s always been about you”. I was hit by the absurdity and consumeristic nature of such an ad. I even laughed out loud.

Yet today, in my favorite coffee shop, I very much lived that mantra. It always has been about me. I find myself doing things to drown out the world around me. After all, I have so much going on in my existance as it is. I have little time for others, for their problems, their pain, their hurt, their search for completion and acceptance, even the simple sounds that living life makes. I drown them out with the newest Coldplay, or some chilled-out Snow Patrol.

I tried something different today. I turned down my ipod to the point where I could enjoy my music AND hear the soundtrack of nearby lives as well. Suddenly some things made sense. As followers of God in the way of Jesus (my new description of myself), we struggle with the battle betwen being focusing on our own stuff while loving and caring for others that we share life with. For me, I often find myself doing one or the other – I wallow in my own pain and struggle in one moment and listen to and love on someone else in the next. Maybe we need to stop this “either/or” way of living and move to a more “and” posture. Maybe rather than turning off the sounds of our own journey’s we might just turn them down a bit that we might also be able to listen and learn from the journey’s of others.

In my experience this morning, I am able to listen to my music with all it’s emotional cues AND also hear the clanging of coffee cups, the whirl of the espresso machine, the sounds of the ivy as the wind ruffles through it, the horns of cars alerting pedestrians of their presence on the nearby street, the sputter of the coffee dispenser as it runs out of it’s goods, the creaking of the old wooden floor under the feets of my fellow patrons, the laughs of the joke-teller as well as the joke-receiver, the conversations of troubled parents just outside the door, and even the music that the coffee shop has deemed most appropriate for it’s guests. How we miss out on dimensions of life, dimensions of both God’s creation as well as the progress of his redemptive work in the world around us, when we turn up our music too loud and drown out the world around us.

It’s time that we as God’s people, stop listening only to the “music” of our own lives and existences and add in the sweet sounds of the world around us. The crys of people longing to be valued for who they are, to be seen as what they are – the creative work of God. We must not continue to drown out the injustices of this world, the unloviness of this world, the dark places we wish didn’t exist and turrn down our stuff to the point where we can both be who God is making us to be AND his people commissioned to represent his loving embrace, his healing hand, his unconditional acceptance, his eternal justice, and his all-accepting forgiveness.

To do this, we must be willing to hear both the bad and the good, the beautiful and the unlovely, the excviting and the painful sounds of the earth. Happy listening.