Lent 2013, Day 24: “If Only My People Would Hear Me”

Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.

We spend an estimated 70 to 80 percent of our hours awake in communication with others. Of that time, 45 percent is spent listening (vs. 30 percent speaking, 16 percent reading, and 9 percent writing). Despite all that practice listening, we’re still not very good at it. We typically retain only about a quarter of what we’ve heard. There are any number of reasons—we have other things on our minds, we focus on what the other party is wearing or the way he or she speaks instead of on the content, we find the topic unpalatable for one reason or another. You can probably come up with additional variations on those themes.

We don’t listen well to God either. We tend to do a lot of the talking—help me with this problem, fix this for me, why did you let this—and fail to give him our complete attention when it’s his turn. Perhaps we think we already know what he’s going to say because we’ve heard it before, and chosen not to follow through on his guidance. Perhaps we’re afraid we’re going to get bawled out like naughty children. We forget that, Psalm 81 and Hosea 14: 1-2, 5 show us, when we do listen and attempt to return to God’s ways, we don’t get spanked or sent to our rooms for a time-out. Far from that, actually. We get “the best of the wheat” and “honey from the rock”; our defections will be healed, and we will be loved freely. And those are promises well worth listening to, from the One who never lies.