The House Is Loud and My Head Hurts

Tonight we are making rice with a fried egg on top, and it is the quietest dinner in this whole collection.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. If there is leftover rice, warm it in a pan with a little oil. If not, put rice on now and it takes about eighteen minutes and requires nothing from you while it does. Then, in a small pan, heat a good spoon of oil over medium heat until it shimmers, crack an egg in, and let it go without touching it until the white is completely set and firm and the edges have gone brown and lacy, which takes about three minutes. Slide it onto the rice. Soy sauce over the whole thing, a little vinegar if you like, and hot sauce if there is any. That is dinner. It costs pennies, it takes four minutes of attention, and it is one of those meals people quietly love and rarely admit to.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the egg.

It is that somebody reading this has a headache and a loud house.

Not a crisis. Nothing is wrong. Two people are talking at once and something is on in another room and somebody is asking a question and there is a bag being emptied onto a counter, and every single one of those is normal, and together they are more than a person can hold today.

And underneath it there is a sentence you have not said to anybody, which is: I want everyone to be quiet, and I want to not have to feed anybody tonight. And that sentence feels, to you, like evidence of something bad.

The prophet and the volume

There is a passage in First Kings where God deliberately makes a point about noise.

And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:12, King James Version)

The setting matters. Elijah is not in a spiritual crisis of the abstract kind. He is exhausted, frightened, and has asked to die. He has been fed and made to sleep twice before this conversation even starts.

And when God comes, He does not arrive in the volume. Wind, earthquake, fire, all of them loud, all of them not Him. Then a sound so small the older translations struggle to name it.

That is not a poetic detail. God chose the volume deliberately for a man who could not take any more noise.

You are not sinning by needing it quieter, and God has never once required a person to receive Him at a volume they cannot bear. First Kings 19:12 has the Lord deliberately not in the loud things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a house at six in the evening.

You have not been abandoned in the noise, and heaven has never once mistaken a need for quiet as a lack of love. It is written that after the fire there was a still small voice, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is in the room where the rice is on.

The wanting is not the problem

Now let me deal with the sentence, because I do not think anybody has ever told you it is allowed.

Wanting quiet is a physical need, in the same category as wanting water. It is not a preference and it is not selfishness, and there are bodies for which noise is genuinely costly in a way that other people do not experience and therefore do not believe.

And the reason it turns into guilt is that the noise is made by people you love. So the mind does a bad piece of arithmetic and concludes: I want less of them, therefore I love them less. That arithmetic is wrong. You want less input. That is a completely different thing from wanting less of a person.

Wanting the room quiet is not a verdict on how much you love the people making the sound.

You are allowed to need less of everything for twenty minutes, and God has never once counted that against a person's heart. The passage has God Himself lower the volume for a worn out prophet rather than asking him to endure it, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a body's limit from a person's love.

You have been absorbing this all day without saying a word about it, and nobody in the house knows it costs anything. First Kings 19 has God attend to a man's body and his sleep before He addresses anything else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the same in an ordinary kitchen.

Take four minutes and take them first

Here is the practical part, and it is a sequence rather than a suggestion.

Put the rice on. It needs nothing from you for eighteen minutes. Then leave the room. Go to a bedroom or a bathroom or stand outside the back door, and be somewhere with no sound for four minutes.

Not after dinner. Now, while the rice cooks. Because four minutes taken before the tank is empty are worth about forty taken after.

You are allowed to take the quiet before the tank is empty rather than after, and God has never once made a person earn a rest. Scripture puts it plainly in First Kings 19, and the Holy Spirit carries it further than a page can: the Lord was not in the wind or the fire, but in the smallest sound there was.

Then come back, fry the egg, and put it on the table. The whole meal costs four minutes of attention, and the quiet has already been taken before the rest of it gets spent.

I am not asking you to make the house quiet. You cannot, and trying is what has been exhausting you. I am asking you to leave it for four minutes, which is entirely within your power.

You are permitted to step out of the room, and God has never once made a person's presence a thing they owed continuously. First Kings 19:12 has an encounter arranged in the quiet after everything loud has passed, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes four minutes at a back door do real work.