If you ever
find yourself saying, “Sorry I missed your call,” or looking at the Caller ID
before deciding to answer the phone, you’re not alone. In the well-known story of the call of Samuel
(1 Samuel 3:3-19), we see that God can call at any moment, even in our sleep,
so we have to be alert and vigilant lest we miss the call.
It’s easy to
miss God’s call because we can be taken up with so many tasks, so many
responsibilities, that we lose the ability to hear. It’s easy to miss God’s call if we’re
distracted, out of sorts, or turned in on ourselves. That too can make us hard
of hearing. Or sometimes we deliberately
become hard of hearing because we don’t want to be bothered. We’re comfortable with our lives as they are,
we’re settled, we have our routines and don’t want to be budged by a
calling. Or maybe we’re hard of hearing
because we’re afraid of what the call might ask of us, where it might take us
and how it might change our lives. We choose to sleep through the call no
matter when it comes rather than nurture a “listening heart” that makes us
keenly attuned to all the many ways God calls us, especially the callings that
come every day and are so easy to miss.
Those everyday callings can be a summons to be patient with a person who
is difficult to love. It can be the call
to comfort someone who is struggling or the call to reach out to someone who is
lonely. Or it could be the call to
forgive someone who hurt or disappointed us.
God calls us
all the time. If we’re to hear and
respond to those calls, we must make Samuel’s words our own: “Speak,
Lord, for your servant is listening.” Maybe those should be
the first words out of our mouths at the beginning of the day, words we repeat
throughout the day, and words we include in our prayers at the end of the
day. “Speak,
Lord, your servant is listening.” We should take those words to heart because it’s one thing to
say, “Sorry, I missed your call” to a family member or friend; but what if we
say that to God not just occasionally, but throughout our lives? If we continually miss God’s call, what have
we done with our life?
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