As I awoke this morning I marveled at the quiet. The muffled quiet. I was overwhelmed with the realization of what I wasn’t hearing…

Have you ever worn ear protection for an activity? Like shooting a gun or attending a monster truck show? Do you remember what it felt and sounded like when you finally pulled the plugs out of your ears? That release of pressure and your ears being able to breathe again? The sudden clarity of sound around you? It’s almost a feeling of relief, right? Relief to be functioning normally again and have all your senses working.

Now imagine the opposite. Taking something OUT of your ears and suddenly everything is muffled. It sounds like you actually just stuffed something IN your ears to block the sound. You have a sense of being within yourself and disconnected from the outside world. There’s a barrier. THIS is what it feels like in my consciousness when I pull the hearing aids out of my ears. THIS is the life I have been living for the last twenty plus years. The muffled disconnected life.

Slap. It stings. The sadness of knowing how separated I have been from the hearing world. What I’ve missed. What I haven’t been able to see with my ears. The feeling that something was stolen from me. It was taken away. I was naive. I was completely ignorant to so many things around me because I could not hear them. Now I know and I can’t un-know.

There’s a deep mourning in the pit of my heart. The picture of what I’ve been missing is coming more and more into focus.

The magnitude is heavy.

I put the devices in my ears and suddenly I hear everything. It’s the polar opposite. Sounds are magnified. I can hear my hair brush against my ear. There are moments when it’s too much. Sensory overload. My ears will never function the way God intended ears to function. Everything is magnified or nothing is. All or nothing. That’s how it feels. I have to endure the feeling that the person standing near me is talking loudly if I want to be able to hear the person across the room who’s talking to me. I have to hyper focus on splitting the sounds and separating them.

Hearing aids are not magic. Hearing aids don’t make a non-hearing person hear like a normal person. They amplify sound. Before the hearing aids I would always have to put my energy, every ounce of willpower, into hearing people. That experience is completely different from where my focus has to be with the hearing aids in. I’ve totally changed a part of myself that my brain now needs to figure out how to navigate.

I feel sadness. As I laid in bed ruminating over what I’ve lost, a passage came to my mind…

Ecclesiastes 3:1-15
1 To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
9 What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?
10 I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.
11 He hath made every thing beautiful in his time; also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.
12 I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life.
13 And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.
14 I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him.
15 That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.

I will allow myself a time to mourn. I won’t shove it away. I won’t pretend it’s not there. I won’t berate myself for feeling it. I won’t tell myself I’m ungrateful for what I do have. I won’t belittle feeling loss.

I will weep. I will mourn. I will embrace.

And when I’m done weeping, mourning, and embracing; I will then laugh. I will then dance. I will refrain from embracing.

And…

I will SING!!! I will sing, because for the first time I can hear what my voice sounds like when it sings! I don’t have to mouth the words, I can make the sounds of singing a word and not worry about what it might sound like to those who can hear it… now I will KNOW what it sounds like and I KNOW it will be beautiful.