Word came across the wire this week of a widespread Spectrum outage — internet down, cable frozen, whole neighborhoods suddenly cut off from the steady hum of screens and streams they'd grown used to. For some folks it was a minor inconvenience. For others it was a small crisis: the work-from-home laptop useless, the kids restless, the evening plans of scrolling and streaming quietly canceled.
I'll confess something. When I hear about an outage like that, part of me smiles. Not because I wish anyone trouble, but because I know what those unplugged hours can do to a person if they let them.
The gift hidden inside the interruption
We have arranged our lives around a constant signal. There is always something to check, something buffering, something one thumb-swipe away. And most of the time we don't even notice how full the air has gotten — full of notifications, full of noise, full of the low anxious buzz of always being reachable and always reaching.
Then the signal drops. And there is a strange, almost uncomfortable stillness. What do we do with our hands? What do we do with the quiet?
The psalmist heard God speak into exactly that kind of quiet: "Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth" (Psalm 46:10). Notice the order there. First the stillness, then the knowing. We do not usually arrive at the deep knowledge of God in a hurry, with six tabs open. We come to know Him in the stillness we so often work hard to avoid.
We are not meant to be reachable every second
Even Jesus, who had more genuine demands on His attention than any of us will ever have, made a habit of disconnecting. "And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone" (Matthew 14:23). The crowds wanted more of Him. The needs were real and endless. And still He climbed the mountain and let the noise fall away below Him.
If the Son of God needed to unplug from the demands of the crowd, what makes us think we can run on an unbroken signal forever? We were built for rhythms — work and rest, speaking and silence, connection and solitude. When those rhythms break down, our souls grow thin and jittery, like a battery that's never allowed to fully charge.
What might fill the silence
So here is a thought. The next time the screen goes dark — whether it's an outage you didn't choose or a quiet you decide to make on purpose — don't rush to fill it. Sit in it a moment. Let the room be still.
You might find your spouse looking up from across the table, actually available for a conversation. You might hear a child asking a question they've been carrying around all day. You might, in the plain silence of your own kitchen, hear that gentle prompting of the Holy Spirit that gets drowned out when the volume of life is turned all the way up.
Here in Ravenna, some of the sweetest moments of our church family don't happen on a screen at all. They happen on a porch, at a kitchen table, walking a dusty road at the end of a summer day — the times when nobody is checking anything and everybody is simply present.
The signal will come back. It always does. The technicians will restore the connection and the screens will light up again and life will resume its ordinary hum. But the deeper connection — the one that never suffers an outage, the one that runs to the very throne of God — that one is always available. It doesn't buffer. It doesn't drop. It doesn't require you to be productive or entertained or reachable.
It only asks that you be still, and know. And into that stillness comes the One who has been waiting there all along, saying quietly and without hurry, "I am God." He is exalted whether or not the network is up. And He is nearer than the phone in your pocket.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.