Can you hear that?

How is it that God starts a movement of the heart?  How does He chose to speak to us...to me? 

Last night we had a prayer/worship service for our teens.  We spent an hour praising and praying to our Creator.  We went through eight different stations dealing with things from self image to lying to over indulgence to vanity.  At each station, we were challenged to take a scoop of sand from a bucket if we struggled with that thing.  After a while, our bags began to grow heavy.  Our struggles and sins began to become a physical burden to carry.  Our eyes were opened to the fact that we carry way too much in our lives.  That in the hustle and bustle of trying to do Christianity, we have forgotten what it mean to BE a follower.

We spent some time just listening.  Waiting.

Then we left the bags, filled w/ our struggles, in a pile at the front of the room.  Does that mean we won't struggle with those things?  Hardly.  In fact, we might struggle more.  The point of the whole night was to not go through some feeble exercise, naively thinking it was really taking our struggles away.  No, more importantly, we took the time to listen.

We see in 1 Kings 19, that God speaks to Elijah while he was in a dark place in his life.  God tells Elijah to come out of the cave he's hiding in, because the Lord was going to pass by.  It says that a wind tore through, but that God wasn't in that.  Next an earthquake, but God wasn't in that either.  And last a fire came, but God wasn't there as well.  Then, a gentle whisper.  In Scripture all of these natural occurrences can be seen as a precursor to the coming of God.  But not here.  That fact has tremendous importance to us.

So what's the lesson that God spoke in a gentle whisper and not the miraculous or spectacular?  That when God speaks to us, more often than not, He speaks to His people.  Reformations, and awakenings all at the hearing of that gentle whisper. 

In the passage above, it says that when Elijah heard it he covered his face and went out to see the Lord.  It might take a while for us to hear that whisper.  We might have to take some time to look over our lives, to get rid of some clutter to hear him, but when we do hear it- how will we respond?

I would challenge you to take a moment right now, to go somewhere quiet and listen.  You never know what you might hear.

Blessings