When we came home from Lake Superior, I noticed something I wasn’t expecting. I wanted to see people.
After several days in a completely secluded cabin, with Lake Superior on one side and woods surrounding us everywhere else, I got exactly what I needed: quiet, rest, time with God, time with Anthony, and time away from the normal sounds and activity of everyday life. I loved it.
And then I came home and went for a walk through our neighborhood. I found myself stopping to talk with people. I played with some of the kids as I walked by. I heard the familiar sounds of people outside, children playing, neighbors talking, cars coming and going, and everyday life happening all around me. Instead of wanting to get away from it, I relished it.
That surprised me because the neighborhood hadn’t changed while I was gone. The kids weren’t suddenly quieter. There weren’t fewer people outside. No one had received a memo that Cheri had returned refreshed from Lake Superior and everyone needed to behave accordingly.
The sounds were the same. I was hearing them differently.
When Everything Starts to Feel Like Noise
Have you ever reached a point where even things you normally enjoy begin to feel like too much? Another conversation, another notification, another person who wants something, another question to answer, another sound in the background when all you want is a little quiet.
It doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t love the people around us or appreciate our lives. Sometimes we’re simply full. When our minds are already crowded, it doesn’t take much for one more thing to feel like an intrusion. Things we would normally welcome can begin to feel like something we need to escape.
Before we left, I wanted quiet. I wanted to get away from the constant input. I wanted to hear the lake instead of traffic and trees instead of neighborhood activity. There was nothing wrong with wanting that. I needed it.
But after having several days with almost none of the normal sounds of life around me, I realized something I hadn’t expected: sometimes what we call noise is actually life happening around us.
That doesn’t mean all noise is good. We live with an extraordinary amount of unnecessary input, and I still believe we need to intentionally unplug from it. My time at Lake Superior reinforced that for me. But it also reminded me not to put everything into the same category.
A notification on my phone may be noise. A child laughing outside my window isn’t necessarily noise. Another piece of information I don’t need may be noise. A neighbor stopping to say hello is connection. There is a difference, and sometimes we don’t recognize it until we have enough space inside ourselves to appreciate it again.
We Need Quiet, But We Also Need Each Other
God created us for relationship. First and foremost, He created us for relationship with Him, but He also created us to live in relationship with each other.
That can be easy to forget in a world where independence is often celebrated. We learn to handle things ourselves. We become protective of our schedules and our time. We create routines that make life more efficient. We can order what we need without speaking to another person, work from home without seeing another person, communicate through a screen, and go through much of a day with surprisingly little meaningful human interaction.
There are conveniences in that, but there are also costs.
People are not always convenient. Relationships take time. Conversations don’t always fit neatly into our schedules. People interrupt us. They need us at times we didn’t plan. They tell long stories when we have somewhere to be. Children are rarely concerned about whether their volume level matches our preference for a peaceful afternoon.
And yet those same people bring laughter, encouragement, companionship, perspective, love, and belonging into our lives. The very things that sometimes interrupt our plans can also be the things that make our lives richer.
I don’t want to become so good at protecting my time that I stop making room for people.
Peace Isn’t the Absence of People
I have been thinking about that since we came home. Sometimes we talk about protecting our peace as though peace requires removing everything and everyone who disrupts us.
There are absolutely times when boundaries are necessary. There are relationships and situations that are unhealthy, and wisdom matters. This isn’t about allowing unlimited access to our lives or ignoring what God may be showing us about a relationship. But I wonder if we sometimes confuse peace with the absence of interruption.
Real peace cannot depend on everyone around us behaving exactly the way we prefer. If my peace disappears every time someone interrupts me, disappoints me, needs something from me, or makes more noise than I would like, then what I have may be closer to controlled circumstances than peace.
Jesus said in John 14:27, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives.” His peace isn’t dependent on a perfectly quiet environment.
That’s important to me because I don’t want to need isolation in order to experience peace. I want to appreciate quiet when I have it and still carry peace back into the fullness of everyday life. Peace isn’t necessarily the absence of people. Sometimes peace is being grounded enough in God that we can be fully present with them.
Solitude Has a Purpose
In my last blog, I wrote about what happens when we get quiet. I still believe deeply in the necessity of stepping away. Jesus did it. He withdrew from the crowds and spent time alone with His Father, but He didn’t remain there. He returned to the people.
That distinction has stayed with me. Solitude has a purpose. It gives us room to rest, listen, pray, notice, and allow some of the internal noise to settle. But for most of us, the goal isn’t to create a life where no one ever interrupts us.
We get quiet so we can return. We rest so we have something to give. We step away long enough to remember what matters. And sometimes stepping away allows us to see the very life we left behind with new eyes.
That’s what happened to me. The seclusion at Lake Superior was exactly what I needed. I wouldn’t change it. I loved waking up surrounded by woods. I loved looking out at the lake. I loved not hearing traffic or the normal activity of a neighborhood.
But I wasn’t meant to live there forever, and strangely, the quiet made me appreciate what was waiting for me at home.
The Beautiful Inconvenience of People
Community isn’t built only in scheduled gatherings or planned conversations. A lot of it happens in small, ordinary moments. It’s stopping for a few minutes when a neighbor wants to talk. It’s knowing the children who live around you well enough that you can play with them when you walk by. It’s waving to the person across the street. It’s noticing when someone hasn’t been around.
It’s also allowing a conversation to last a little longer than you planned because the person standing in front of you matters more than staying exactly on schedule. Those moments may seem insignificant, but collectively they create something we all need: connection.
We were never created to do life completely alone. Even those of us who enjoy solitude need people. We need people who know us, people we can laugh with, people who challenge us, people we can encourage, people who notice when something is different, and people whose presence reminds us that our lives are connected to something beyond ourselves.
And yes, sometimes those people will interrupt our quiet. Maybe that isn’t always a bad thing.
What Changed?
Coming home helped me recognize that sometimes the thing I believe needs to change isn’t actually the thing that needs changing.
I could have decided our neighborhood was too noisy. I could have wished the kids would quiet down, the cars would stop going past, or people would leave me alone when I went for a walk. But none of those things changed while I was gone.
I had been restored enough to experience them differently.
That realization has made me wonder how often our irritation with something is telling us less about the thing itself and more about what is happening within us.
Maybe we don’t always need fewer people; maybe we need rest. Maybe we don’t always need everyone to stop asking things of us; maybe we need healthier boundaries around the things that are unnecessarily draining us so we still have room for what matters. Maybe we don’t always need life to become quieter; maybe we need to become quieter inside.
There is wisdom in knowing when we need solitude. There is also wisdom in knowing when it is time to come back.
I needed Lake Superior, the woods, and the quiet. And then I needed my neighborhood. I needed the conversations, the laughter, the kids, and the ordinary sounds of people living their lives around me.
Sometimes we need to get away from the noise long enough to realize how much of it we actually missed. And sometimes, when we return with a little more room inside ourselves, we discover something unexpected:
Maybe it wasn’t noise after all.