A Word About Flashbang

Like most Americans, I would guess, I’ve been watching the news lately. The disruptive crowds of obviously angry people. Stopping traffic. Waving flags of various countries. Holding up signs with slogans people hope other people will read and be affected by. And when night comes, the crowds become even more unruly. One of the tools those police use for dealing with unruly crowds is something called a flashbang device.

They’re small grenades. They don’t destroy things. They’re designed to disorient, or blind people in a crowd with light and a deafening noise. The shock of that light and noise causes people to lose their bearings. People forget where they are, for a brief second. They’re not even sure they’re thinking straight. I guess you don’t even have to be hit by one. Just being near it when it explodes is enough to totally stun you for a bit.

I’ve never experienced one of those flashbang grenades going off near me. But there are lots of different flashbangs that can go off in life’s neighborhood that can totally stun a person. You’ve probably experienced some stunning events in life, yourself.

A cancer diagnosis. A job loss. A relationship betrayal. Or maybe just a phone call you never saw coming that made a tremendous bang in your life.

Those kind of flashbangs don’t necessarily destroy you outright. Instead, they disorient and confuse. They cloud the horizon of faith, and clog our paths in life. I’ve experienced a ‘bang’ so loud I can’t un-hear it. Some flash of reality has suddenly appeared that I can’t un-see. My journey, my faith seem confused. And for a little while, I find myself feeling for all the world as if I’m wandering around in acrid smoke, unsure of which way is up, which direction leads to escape.

The Psalmist said: “Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10) I love that verse because it’s not directed toward the noisy world I live in. That verse is not telling the flashbangs in my life to be still. Flashbangs make a loud noise. If they didn’t make a loud noise in my life, there would be no reason for God to encourage me to ‘be still.’ But then, if the flashbangs in my life are making an untenable noise, what better encouragement could I ever hear than that admonishment to be still, and know that He is God.

The flashbangs of life: grief, conflict, pressure, confusion, may be going off all around us. And we may feel like we’re left blinking, wondering what in our world is happening. That’s what a loud noise in life does. It numbs. It jumbles. It disorients.

But it doesn’t erase truth. I know that He is God. Being still is a way of saying, “I don’t know what just exploded, but I do know who I belong to.” He’s not shouting in the midst of my confusion.

But He’s still speaking. A.W. Tozer once wrote, “The voice of God is a friendly voice. No one need fear to listen to it unless he has already made up his mind to resist it.”