He Misses the Noise

At about eleven at night, in a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a building with good insulation, Hisham puts on a recording of a market.

He found it two years ago on a video site. It is forty-one minutes long and it was filmed by somebody walking through a souk with a phone, and there is nothing in it. No music. Just people. Traders calling, a scooter, a metal shutter, three men arguing about something in a doorway, a child, a bird, somebody laughing four stalls down.

He plays it most nights. He does not watch it. He puts it on and does the dishes and gets into bed and lets it run until it stops.

Hisham is thirty-nine. He worked his uncle's stall from fourteen to thirty-six, and the arrangement at the end of it was not one anybody would defend, and he left, and there was a period of about eight months where nobody in the family spoke to him and now most of them do. He drives for a delivery company. He has a savings account for the first time in his life. He is, in every sense he can name, better off.

And he plays a recording of a market to fall asleep.

He has told nobody. He is aware of how it would sound. His cousin would make it into something. His mother would take it as an opening. A friend would be kind about it, which would be worse.

Here is the night it caught.

The recording ended and he was still awake, and the apartment was so quiet he could hear the refrigerator, and he lay there and thought, with total clarity: I do not miss the stall. I do not miss my uncle. I miss the noise.

And then he thought: what is wrong with a man who has to be sung to sleep by a market he ran away from.

You have a sound like that. A place, a room, a street, a house, that you were right to leave, and there is a piece of it you go looking for when it gets too quiet, and you have never told a single person.

He answered it with bread

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to go back to the stall or the street or the house. I am not going to tell you to delete the recording either, which would be a small cruelty dressed as advice. I am not going to give you a verdict on your uncle or your family.

What I will do is take you to a complaint in Exodus 16 and show you what God does with it, because most people know the complaint and nobody looks at the reply.

Israel is about six weeks out. And they say this:

Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.Exodus 16:3

That is not a mild complaint. That is a people telling God they would rather have died in Egypt. And notice the image they reach for: when we sat by the flesh pots. Sitting by the pots. Not the bricks. Not the quotas. The evening, the cooking, the ordinary domestic noise of a place where the food was on and everybody was there.

Now. What does God do with that.

He does not answer the complaint. Read the next verse. He does not explain that Egypt was worse, He does not correct their memory, He does not give them a lecture about ingratitude. He says: I will rain bread from heaven for you.

You are complaining to somebody who answers with provision rather than with a correction, and Exodus 16 is where that gets established. Exodus 16:4 follows the complaint immediately with bread, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into an apartment at eleven at night.

Now hold on to what they were actually missing, because it is the same thing you are missing. They named the pots. They named the sitting. What they were describing is a room with people in it and food going and noise, and that is not a defense of Egypt, it is a description of being among your own.

You have been missing your own people rather than the arrangement, and Scripture puts that distinction in the words the complainers chose. It is written that they remembered sitting by the pots, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a longing for a room from being read as a longing for a yoke.

Noise is not nostalgia

Now let me be careful here, because this is where a message like this could hurt a man.

Hisham's forty-one minutes is not weakness. It is not a spiritual regression and it is not, in any meaningful sense, a step toward going back. A man who intended to go back would not need a recording; he would need a bus ticket.

What the recording actually is, is a body asking for the sound of company. He spent twenty-two years in a street where there were always other people within twenty feet of him, and now he lives on the fourth floor of a building where the walls work, and the silence is not peace to him, it is absence.

You are not being reprimanded for needing the sound of other people, and God said in Genesis that it is not good for a man to be alone before there was one single thing wrong with the world. Genesis 2:18 puts that before the fall, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an ordinary human need from being spiritualized into a fault.

And here is what I want to take off you, which is not the recording. It is the second thought, the one that came after the true one. What is wrong with a man who has to be sung to sleep by a market he ran away from.

Nothing. Nothing is wrong with him. He is a man who left an arrangement and is still owed a room with people in it, and the recording is a placeholder for a thing he has not been given yet.

You are missing something you were made for rather than something you should be over, and there is a difference and Scripture knows it. Exodus 16:3 has them naming a room rather than a system, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reads that correctly when a person cannot.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the evenings have gone somewhere darker than lonely, or if the eight months of silence from your family left something you have never looked at, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. A cousin, a friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you anything about your family. That is me refusing to leave you in that apartment by yourself.