The prologue from Bruce C. and Marie K. Hafen’s book ‘Faith is Not Blind”:
The barren hills of the Judean Wilderness rolled out in every direction from where we stood overlooking Wadi Qelt, a river valley and ancient road between Jerusalem and Jericho. We wondered out loud to each other how a mortal could survive forty days of fasting in this country the way Christ had. Suddenly our thoughts were jolted by the sound of artillery fire in the distance. With a closer listen we realized the sound was coming from a shooting range, and it was not near enough to do us harm. But the sound of the rapid fire ripped at our spiritual senses and abruptly changed the focus of the moment.
As we turned to go back to our car, a friend traveling with us asked if she could have just a few more minutes there. We watched her walk a bit farther into the wadi and a few minutes later walk back up, while the caustic rattle of the machine guns sounded only a few hills away. It wasn’t until we were on the shores of the Sea of Galilee a day or two later that she shared what she had heard between the lines of gunfire. “I was so annoyed by how those guns were making it hard to feel the Spirit,” she said. “But then I heard a thought come up from the dry soil as clearly as if someone had spoken it: ‘Listen below the noise.’ As I paid closer attention to what I was sensing, the thought grew into a full message: ‘Listen below the noise. I made these hills. I am the Creator. All the gunfire is superficial noise to me. I can blow it away in a breath. I put the pulse in this earth. I put the same pulse in you. Listen below the noise for my voice . . . and stick with Me.'”
Metaphorically and literally speaking, our times are filled with gunfire. The crossfire of these days seems constant and can keep us spinning in conflict, confusion, and conundrums brought on by loud and competing voices. We live in a complex world. The relentless chaos can make us feel like goldfish in a blender bowl with a three-year-old at the switch.
We can’t, in offering you this book, stop the three-year-old or the gunfire, but we hope we can help you learn to listen below the noise—the noise in the world and the noise in you. We aren’t attempting here to resolve all of the issues you may be confronting. But we are hoping you find in these pages a pattern of how to think about your questions and how, through grappling with them, to nourish your faith, We hope to help you make calm out of chaos. We hope to help you hear Him. ~Bruce C. and Marie K. Hafen, Faith Is Not Blind (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2018), 1-2
