Words from WW Blog

“And God’s peace, which is far beyond human understanding, will keep your hearts and minds safe in union with Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7)

The town council of Carmel, California is having the first reading on December 2 of a new ordinance that would ban pickleball in the town. The constant noise of paddles on the hard plastic balls of the most popular sport in America has taken its toll on citizens seeking peace and quiet.

One solution that went thud was the suggestion to play with quieter equipment, but pickleball purists said that was not an option. To them, the sound of the ball hitting the paddle needed to be at a certain pitch…kinda like the smack of a baseball bat making contact with a pitched ball. Carmel citizens living around the current pickleball courts aren’t going for that. They never knew how pleasant the sound of quiet was until they no longer had it.

Sometimes, one person’s peace is another person’s disgruntlement…and vice versa. It’s interesting to me that we often couple quiet with peace, as if quiet is peace. In a noisy world, quiet is a hard find. I doubt the citizens of Carmel will find peace once the pickleball fanatics have migrated to a kinder, noisier area. They might breathe a sigh of relief that the pinging has subsided, but peace is a much deeper find than silence.

The scriptures connect true peace with God, not with quiet. It’s an inner calmness and quiet that is able to drown out the chaos of the world and the shouting of the urgent; an inner “settling” that firmly grasps our God Who is a caregiver and a stress-taker.

This entry was posted on December 1, 2025 at 2:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.