Out of Heaven He Made Thee to Hear

He wears defenders from about ten past seven until half four, and they are not optional.

The machine he works nearest to runs at a level where a man standing four feet away has to touch your arm to say anything. There is a compressor. There is a saw that goes through the whole building. There is the extraction, which is the one that gets into your head, and which is running whether or not anything else is.

He is forty one. He has done this since he was nineteen.

And he has quietly written the whole of it off.

Not the job. He likes the job and he is good at it and it has fed three children. He has written off the ten hours as time in which the spiritual side of his life is simply not available, in the way that a man underwater is not available to a telephone.

Here is what he has never said out loud.

That is fifty hours a week. Since nineteen. He did the arithmetic once, on a Sunday, and stopped doing it, because the number is very large and it made him feel like a man who has spent half his adult life in a room where God cannot reach him.

Look at the conditions at the mountain

There is a summary in Deuteronomy of what happened at Sinai, and it is worth reading with the volume in mind.

Out of heaven he made thee to hear his voice, that he might instruct thee: and upon earth he shewed thee his great fire; and thou heardest his words out of the midst of the fire.Deuteronomy 4:36

Now recall the conditions that verse is summarizing. The mountain burning to the heart of heaven. Thick darkness, cloud, smoke going up like a furnace. A trumpet getting louder and louder. Thunder. The whole mountain quaking violently, and a nation of people so frightened they asked for it to stop.

That is the loudest scene in the entire Bible. There is nothing else like it for sheer sensory overload.

And the summary of it is: thou heardest his words out of the midst of the fire.

Not despite the fire. Out of the midst of it. The hearing happened inside the loudest conditions God has ever arranged, and the writer of Deuteronomy states it as the central fact about that day.

You are able to hear inside the noise, and the clearest national hearing in Scripture happened at the top of a burning mountain with a trumpet going. That is what the word actually records, not encouragement I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that plain to a man in defenders.

Fifty hours is not a dead zone

Now the plain thing, and it is about arithmetic.

You've written off fifty hours a week for twenty two years, which is a very large piece of a life, and you did it on the basis of an assumption you've never examined: that a certain decibel level puts a man outside the range.

There is no such level anywhere in Scripture. There is no verse that establishes a threshold. What there is, in Deuteronomy, is a report of the loudest event in the book being the one where a nation heard.

And there is something else worth saying, which any man who has worked in noise knows. You think in there. All day. You solve things, you plan, you hold conversations with yourself, you work out what you will say to somebody that evening. The interior life does not stop at ten past seven. Only the expectation does.

And nothing about your working day has ever put you out of range. Scripture puts the hearing in the midst of the fire, and the Holy Spirit is not held off by a compressor.

Listen without taking anything off

Here is the practical piece, and it comes with a safety note that matters.

Do not take the defenders off. Nothing in this article asks you to do anything unsafe or to stop doing your job properly, and if it did it would not be worth reading.

Listen inside them.

Pick a recurring stretch: the forty minutes on that machine after the first break, the walk between the two buildings, the last half hour when the extraction is all that is left running. And in it, expect. Say something to Him inside your own head, in the middle of the noise, without waiting for a gap that will not come.

You are able to expect on the floor at eleven in the morning, and the expecting is where hearing starts. Deuteronomy 4:36 has a nation hearing out of the midst of the fire, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a shift to end.