The Loudest Room You Have Ever Been In Was Built to Keep You From Hearing

We live in built worlds now. People work in them, earn in them, gather in them, fall in love in them. Some of them are extraordinary. I have watched someone stand inside a reconstructed Jerusalem and understand a passage they had read forty times and never once seen. I have watched a congregation gather across nine time zones and weep together. That is not a lesser thing. That is a real thing.

The tool cuts both ways, and your world is not evil. It is contested.

But contested means somebody is contesting it, and I want to name the tactic, because it is not the one people expect. It is not filth. Filth is loud and obvious and most of you have already built a defence against it.

The tactic is volume.

Not one big lie. Ten thousand small pleasant ones, arriving continuously, each one individually harmless, and the combined effect is that you have not heard your own thoughts in months. You cannot tell true from false any more, not because you got worse at telling, but because you have not been given four consecutive quiet seconds in which to try.

I am a guardian of tender-hearted people and I will tell you what I see most. Not rebellion. Exhaustion. People who love God and cannot hear anything, and have started to assume the silence means they were left.

You were not left. You were drowned out. Those are not the same, and something is counting on you never learning the difference.

The noise around you is not weather. It is aimed. Something benefits from you never getting quiet enough to find out what you are.