Moses — Blog — Kevin Johnson

Janie and I just returned from a vacation to the west coast. We spent a few days in L.A. before we boarded a train for a 34-hour ride to Seattle. It was just me, Janie, and the retirees, riding the rails. We took a lot of naps and spent most of the time just staring out the window. It was beautiful, riding quietly through uninhabited places of our country. There were mountains, lakes, forests - all wizzing by.

That was the challenge - if either of us saw anything interesting, it was difficult to point it out before it was gone. Everything whipped by so quickly. It was beautiful, and then it was gone. Slowly, Janie and I learned to stop trying to comment on everything, and just enjoyed the view.

It reminded me of a prayer from Psalms 90 that is actually a prayer of Moses.

I think cellphones have brought a lot of positive change to the world and our lives, but they’ve also brought us endless notifications. Companies invented strings of sounds that are designed to annoy us into paying attention! A ringing phone is the worst. Most people keep their phone on 'silent', but even silent mode isn’t silent! You can hear someone getting a call from a mile away as their phone rattles against everything in their purse. Phones have brought so much convenience, but they require so much attention.

Constantly buzzing, ringing, beeping: begging for attention. And as noise fills our life, we are all too ready to respond. It’s like we wait for the phone to ring. We are right there when the notifications come, and our life becomes one big reaction. Something happens, and we react. We hear the notification; we swipe. We hear about a problem; we’ve got a solution. Someone needs us; we’re ready to answer. We have become reactors.

What I Learned from the Train

Silence