For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived a “loud” kind of life.

I love bright and bold and busy and constantly freight-train fast.

I love music sung in 15-passenger vans at decibel levels that have the drivers at the light next to me nodding their heads, and I love the electricity of a room packed out with people I love.

If our crazy, chaotic, constantly on-the-go military life could be played in song version, it would be one filled with drum sets and cymbals [definitely played by un-showered boys in no pants] and the melodies of a thousand screaming electric guitars.

Because in this house that is something like the OPPOSITE of tranquil, we all kind of like to live and love out loud (and the ones who don’t just haven’t yet learned the meaning of an “inside voice”).

But then came Covid.

And then came quarantine.

And then came the realization that maybe, just maybe, this loud life we’ve been living has been drowning out something much quieter.

Much calmer.

Much more important.

Like the still-small voice of JESUS.

What’s actually crazy is that it took a world pandemic to interrupt our jam session and get us to turn down the noise long enough to hear a song our sweet Savior has been playing all along.

The one that offers REAL Resurrection life instead of a cheap, loud cover of the real kind.

As we’re learning to tune into the sweet melodies of Jesus, we’re kicking a lot of electric guitars off our stage, and we’re doing a lot of dying to self over here in these parts.

Dying to our calendar.

Dying to our expectations.

Dying to the drugs of busyness and activity we’ve used so often to drown out the need for silence, stillness and reflection.

I thought after four weeks of social distancing in our home, I might finally be making some progress in that whole dying-to-self category.

I mean, Jeez and I (because after four weeks alone in a home with five penises, Jesus and I are now on nickname status) had addressed my extrovert’s addiction to people and people pleasing and that whole slavery-to-my calendar and productivity-as-an-idol thing we’ve been working on for years. (Although, confession, Jesus, I would have given my left arm on Saturday for 60 minutes in a room talking about my feelings with any creature that didn’t have a penis. Just being real.)

We’d made the quarantine cuts and the band that was now playing on our family’s stage was a much stiller, softer version than the one jamming out in deaf tones before this pandemic.

But there was apparently still too much noise.

Because early Monday morning, after a fierce Easter storm, Jesus made another cut to the band, and we lost power, water and internet while stuck in the house in quarantine.

Want a good heart check?

Talk to an internet provider who tells you and your five other quarantined family members who are under stay-at-home orders until April 30 that there’s no way a tech can come out to fix the internet that four children and one soldier now rely on for homeschool and military retirement classes for at least five days, and, if it takes as long to fix as it did last time, possibly three WEEKS.

And that now, your cell phone, your one and only link to the female species and the outside world, will now be used (and ONLY used) as the world’s slowest hot spot for four homeschooling computers.

All. Day. Long.

Kill electric guitar riff as you realize the size of your frustration in the face of a tiny, first-world inconvenience in a world where people are literally DYING DAILY of Covid-19.

Drop the mic.

And the last guitar on the stage is not the flashy electric one with all the bells and whistles and glitter and lights but the one that has been playing the sweetest and most beautiful love song underneath the riffs of this world this entire time.

Just His.

So this week, as my dear friend Kristy so beautifully put it, we are returning to the “acoustic” version of our lives.

It’s not Jesus plus anything.

Without internet or school or calendars or activities, it’s His song alone.

And we’re hearing it everywhere.