Noise

I had to fix a radio last week. It wasn’t my radio, or even my unit’s radio, but it had been down for 4 months and they just needed new eyes on it. It took me maybe 5 minutes to fix it. The default noise floor of the radio was set really high and they didn’t know to lower it to the measured noise floor. (A noise floor is the normal level of ambient radiation caused by solar and interstellar radiation, and decay in the Earth.) I dropped the noise floor where it needed to be and suddenly the radio worked.

I think that is sort of what living a life where you are worthy to enter God’s presence (or as close as us humans can get) does. It cuts out the noise that would normally drown out the Spirit of God.

Another thing that can drown out a radio signal you are looking for is competing signals. I saw this quite a bit in the oilfields of West Texas in the 900 MHz spectrum.

The 900 MHz spectrum is wide open – totally unmanaged by the government. That means you can transmit and receive on any of those frequencies without a license granted by the FCC. The end result is that everyone steps on each others’ frequencies. When you have two people transmitting at the same frequency different data, they interfere with each other and neither work well, unless one pumps their power up really high.

We know the Spirit of God is a still, small voice – it isn’t trying to compete with the world. It is trying to make us still people who are not distracted by the world. If we don’t tune out the world we will never hear it.