DAILY BYTEToday’s challenge of listening is perhaps foundational to all other acts of listening, and it is this:
Stop to listen to God, and through that act of listening you will find that life opens up to you in the most amazing ways.
On Monday, I mentioned how God is a speaking God, and that the Bible is about God’s words reaching out to us because love always seeks to communicate. Many of you may have wondered at that though.
Your experience may have been of a frustratingly silent God ... a God who does not really seem to hear our prayers and pleas. Now sometimes, as many great saints have experienced and taught, we do go through ‘long dark moments of the soul,’ moments where we don’t hear from God, but truth be told, MOST of the time we don’t hear from God for entirely different reasons.
Simply put, we don’t hear from God because we just do not take the time to actually listen!
Let’s do a snap questionnaire – over the last week, add up in your head the amount of time you spent praying or talking to God. Now, add up the amount of time you actually spent listening to God.
God is constantly speaking into this world, but we have just lost the art and discipline of listening.
Frederick Buechner reminds us that all moments in life are key moments, and that if we listen to our lives, if we really pay attention, we will recognise the presence of the holy speaking to us in the ordinary.
In her book ‘Travelling Mercies,’ Annie Lamott recalls an old story about a man sitting in a bar in Alaska getting drunk. He was telling the bartender that he had recently lost his faith in God after his twin engine plane crashed into the tundra.
“So,” he spat out bitterly, “I lay there in the wreckage praying with all my might and crying out to God to save me, but God didn’t raise a finger to help me. I’m through believing in a God who doesn’t care about what happens to me.”
“But you’re here talking to me,” said the surprised bartender, “obviously you were saved.”
“Yeah that’s right,” replied the man, “only because finally some old Eskimo came along.”
If you learn to listen to your life, and the people in your life, you will be surprised to find how much of God is in this world. You will discover how much grace there is in even the most ordinary things. You will begin to recognise how many of your own ‘Eskimos’ – answers to prayers and moments of grace – you do not even recognise for what they are.
So perhaps we should stop running after our particular Babel towers, and stop expecting to find our life’s significance through our achievements, gifts and talents – through what we can tell the world.
Surprising as this may be, perhaps the greatest difference you can make in your lifetime, and the most profound way you can open the ordinary up to the holy is to just stop and listen more.
So may you be still then ... and may you hear.
PRAY AS YOU GO
Lord God, teach me to listen to you – to hear your voice spoken into the very ordinary things of everyday life. Give me the strength and discipline I need to structure into my life moments of silence and moments of careful listening. Amen.
FOCUS READING
John 10:27-30
My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.
