Listening

During a wearisome season some time ago I had a dream that I was trying to get to a worship service I was supposed to be leading. As I frantically searched for items I needed--shoes and music, as I remember--I could hear over the PA system that the service was beginning without me. To my surprise, a trio of women sang a song I'll bet you've never heard--one I had never heard either because my dream was making it up. The lyrics? "Lord you have my number, Lord you have my number, Lord you have the number to my soul." Words, melody, and even harmonies remained with me until morning and I shared the dream and song with my family at breakfast. As we laughed together my husband added his own verse and voice: "When you gonna call me? When you gonna call me?" When the hilarity died down, I heard my soul breathe, Yes. When?

Over the years I've come to understand and appreciate that I'm not the only one who sometimes feels my prayers to be a bit one-sided; that it seems I'm calling and leaving messages and then wondering when (and if) God will call me back. While I believe God hears and listens, my deepest desire is to be answered in a voice I recognize with information I understand. But, like a very young friend once commented, God is so quiet!

As a child I had the idea from Bible stories that God's voice was audible and heard by everyone in the room. I've wondered since, however, how that voice would be so discerned that someone decides to leave home and family for an unknown destination, or confronts Pharaoh, or provides shelter for spies, or appears before a king uninvited. We all know our predisposition to mishear--that we're liable to hear thunder when actually heaven is speaking (1).

Some of my early teachers insisted that, however people may have heard in the past, God now speaks through (and some of them would insist only though) the Bible. And yes, I have felt myself spoken to that way throughout my life--as early as first grade when I "heard" from my Sunday school lesson that whoever does not love their brother and sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they haven't. Quite clearly I understood that loving God meant loving my little brother, and that I wasn't doing it very well. Then while I was in college, Peter's invitation to love one another deeply, from the heart (2) rescued and has fostered a life-long friendship. And needing some assurance years ago when we were building our house, the words he leads me beside the still water (3) bubbled up through my worries. Only later did I remember that the name of our new street was Still Water.

Yet even these instances where I feel God to be responding in a personal and particular way seem rare. And maybe they are. God's remembered words covered by Scripture are surprisingly few given the six (or so) millennia of revealed discourse between God and human beings--perhaps so because God finds so few people who are listening and faithful enough to catch, hold, and do what they hear.

James closes his New Testament letter with a nod towards Elijah, the great Old Testament prophet who, says James, was human like us. Yet, when he prayed that it wouldn't rain, no rain fell on the ground for three and a half years. Then he prayed again. It rained and the earth produced crops (4). Obviously, the prayer for rain to end wasn't Elijah's idea or his own personal prayer request; prayer for him included the ability to hear some pretty specific instructions, including where to hide during the long drought, what food he'd find during that time, and how to do the Mt. Carmel showdown. When the rains return and he learns about the price on his head, he hears instructions from the desert to go to another mountain 40 days and nights away. There on Mt. Horeb, wind, earthquake and fire cacophonies announce a quiet presence: a still, perhaps silent, voice curiously asks, What are you doing here, Elijah?" (5)

Elijah's bare-boned response reveals the character of his prayers. Rather than argue or rant his confusion (eg: Shouldn't I be the one asking you that question?!), Elijah recounts his experience and present understanding: I've served you zealously, yet Israel has broken with your covenant and has murdered your prophets. I alone am left, and now they're trying to kill me (6).

Assuming you haven't read the story from 1 Kings lately, and assuming that the voice Elijah hears belongs to God, what response would you expect? I'll give you a moment.

We might imagine that God would empathize (I hear you!) or at least sympathize (Thank you for your service. I'm so sorry for your trouble). God does neither, but simply sends Elijah back down the mountain with yet another list of specific places to go and people to see. Among them? The city of Abel-meholah to find Elisha whom Elijah is to anoint as his successor. The only one of Elijah's complaints that God does address--Elijah's last--God corrects: you're not alone, Elijah; seven thousand others have also been faithful. Even following din of wind, fire and earthquake, Elijah hears and does everything the voice tells him to do. Mercy.

From this story I gather that to pray like Elijah means I might need a new set of ears. And I also gather that I can't assume or predict God's response because what God has to say might be clear out of the bounds of my expectations. Yet, Jesus' brother James says to consider Elijah's prayers and keep praying, adding that Elijah was human like us. So don't make Elijah something "other," or assume that the quality of his prayer life is alien or unavailable to mortals like me.

Fine. But why a still, small voice? Why not answer in a way that will leave me no excuse for not hearing? Because here's the crisis: a quiet word is often a word ignored. Ask any parent or teacher. We ignore instructions we don't want to do or can't imagine doing--like being sent to ask a destitute widow for her last meal. Elijah hears and obeys even this directive, but examples of shrugging off God's instructions are replete in the Bible and I could certainly provide my own. 

As I ask why God doesn't speak louder, I have to remember my days of parenting and learning (eventually) that that while shouting--ok, screaming-- might get me some response or other, turning up the volume wrecks vocal capacity and, more importantly, undermines authority. In Elijah's story, audibility did not authorize the word: the LORD was not in the earthquake...wind...fire.

One afternoon some years back, I left the house to walk off frustration and some self pity from a stinging and, in my opinion, undeserved comment, offered by a critical friend. When my own inner earthquake, wind, and fire had calmed a little, a very quiet thought rose in their wake: What you are obsessing over is not the problem. The tone of the thought was kind, but the surprise rendered was a walk-stopper. For one long moment I stood still and considered whether or not to entertain what I had just "heard" or to let it go and walk on.

Though I can't prove that the words I discerned were God's (7), I entertained them. It took about a month for understanding to unfold--maybe fodder for a later post. For now, let's just say that during and following my walk that day, an enormous blind spot began to be exposed, one that had to do with some misguided assumptions. Along with the difficult realization, however, came some quiet grace, lots of forgiveness, and needed wisdom to fix the problem.

Of course we're still fixing it and I'm still learning to listen.

Interestingly, for the last four or so years I've had to become a student of very intense listening, straining my whole being (8) at times to hear and understand the person I love most in this world as he struggles to communicate against the effects of a rare and wretched diagnosis. Listening, I've learned, is primary to the love we offer others. That's God's idea, by the way: the inaugural prayer given to God's ancient people commands them first to hear and then to love (9).

It's been more than four years since I began this post. As I (hopefully) conclude, I'm sensing another still and small thought to my spray of words, suggesting that I also am quiet. That my prayers are often silent and unformed. That sometimes I don't even show up. That when I do show up I'm distracted by the loudest voice. That I'm not even aware of the continuous stream of love coming my way. The psalmist, by the way, expresses more than once that God's thoughts towards him are countless, like grains of sand in the ocean (10) and heard, he says, because God has opened--dug out or bored a hole in--his ear (11). I'll bet that hurt. But the psalmist responds, Here I am! I'm delighted to do what you want! The psalmist further sings that hearing and responding means more to God than sacrifice and offerings.

This is my beloved Son was long ago heard by a few standing next to Jesus (12). While that voice is sometimes mistaken for thunder or a host of other mis-attributions, Jesus' life and words open hearts and ears, training them to discern what is silently and continuously speaking above our own cacophonies.

Listen to him! is more than likely the loudest thing we'll ever hear God say.

____

1.  John 12:12

2. 1 Peter 1:22
3. Psalm 23:2
4. James 5:17, 18

5. 1 Kings 19:13. Elijah's question deserves its own post. If you've read the story you know one of Elijah's prayers was It is enough. Take my life. What are you doing here, Elijah? feels like a trick question and Elijah's brief answer reminds me of a definition of prayer I read some years back-- that when we pray we don't tell God anything, but relay our condition and sing our suffering as little children sing. Elijah does both.
6. 1 Kings 19:14. The whole story cited here, by the way, can be found in 1 Kings 17-19.
7. I've recently been reminded by NT Wright that God speaks in a variety of ways--circumstances among them. We need to listen on many levels.

8. Psalm 40, one of my favorites, begins with I waited patiently and God inclined... I recently found that the word incline is translated from a word that bears this description: to stretch out, spread out, extend, bend. That's how it feels to listen intently. The exercise requires us to direct all of our powers to hear and understand; that this is how God listens to us and how God wants to be listened to.

9. The Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4, 5): Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is One. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

10. Psalm 40:5; Psalm 139:17, 18
11. Psalm 40:6
12. Matthew 17:5