Speak Lord, your servant is listening… 1 Samuel 3:9 (NIV)

Already Ready – Hearing Series – Part 4

Go to  PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4  |  PART 5  |  PART 6  |  PART 7

How do you listen for the voice of God?

There are a million different things happening around us at any given moment, every day, every week – all the time. We’re sleeping, eating, brushing our hair and teeth, cleaning, watching TV, studying, working, Working, WORKING, driving, holidaying, running errands, paying bills, walking the dog, being with friends, fighting with partners, making up with partners, being sick, exercising, visiting… we live full lives, with the option to do even more always available.

I can’t tell you the number of times that I've jumped in the car, pulled out of my driveway and taken off down the road, when this sense that I’ve left something behind, or something on, creeps up my spine. It lingers… Did I turn off the iron? Is my wallet in my bag? Did I pack clothes for the kids? Where are the house keys? Where is my phone?

And then I think to myself, “How did I ever live without my phone? This device that has me permanently connected to the Internet, apps, messages, Instagram, FB, my bank account, Spotify, Netflix… (not to mention these devotions *wink*).

And our appliances are noisier than ever too. We're living at my mum's while our house is being renovated, and every hour something beeps. (I haven't figured all the beeps out yet…)

Lynne Twist says, (from her book, The Soul of Money):

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of… before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we did or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack…”

Chasing our tails. Lost in the noise. Carried through life by the chaos and the constant tugs of our “to-do’s, to-be’s and to-not’s.”

Sure, there’s joy, there’s hope, there’s that delicious sense of something more… but if we don’t stop and pay attention to those divine promptings, it will always stay ‘just a sense…’ and the ‘not enough’ will steer us away from the beauty and mystery of right now, leaving us to live in the past and worry about the future.

My daughter has not fallen victim to this yet. When she sees a beautiful flower, she’ll stop and sing to it. A lonely man walks by and she yells “Hi, how ya doing?” She sees’s me crying and grabs my face with her two small gorgeous hands and asks me “Why are you crying mummy?”

It’s no wonder that in the midst of the clang and clatter of life, our children hear God’s whisper before we do.

Samuel heard it. While all the adults were sleeping – perhaps not getting enough of it and already anticipating what they won’t get done the next day – Samuel, a small wonder-filled boy, was lost in dreamland. By the light of the moon, through his slumbering state, he heard a voice calling HIS name. Not the priest’s name, or his mother’s name… HIS name. Who was calling to him in the dead of night? Was it Eli? No. Twice he asked. In the twilight hours, when the world is dark and time is silent, God can be heard the loudest…

The third time he heard his name called, Samuel replied,

“Speak Lord, your servant is listening…”

Go to Part 5 – Listen with your Life »
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