Listening with Anticipation
I am expecting God to speak to me.
Are you expecting God to speak to you?
I am confidently expecting God to speak to me.
Are you? Are you confidently expecting God to speak to you?
Whenever I enter into an attitude of child-like anticipation that God is about to speak to me … an ordinary girl … it is in that moment of expectation that everything I experience becomes a possible missive from heaven.
A sermon becomes the voice of God.
A worship song is a telegram from heaven.
A daily devotional becomes a special delivery letter with my name on it.
Today, I am confidently expecting God to speak to me.
And then … I wonder why I don’t always approach life with the same anticipation. What is it about today that makes it any different than yesterday or than last week?
Why don’t I approach every day with the desperate desire to hear from the heart of God?
I have no answer for that question … but this is what I do know:
God wants to speak to His children more than we desire to listen.
How do I know that ? Well, I know that because I am a mom with 5 adult children. I long to have a heart to heart conversation with each one of my children every day. But that rarely happens.
The reason that speaking with my children daily happens so infrequently is because they are busy living productive and powerful lives. I don’t want to interrupt their daily commitments and appointments and so I wait for them to call me.
And when they do call me … I can tell. I can tell immediately whether the conversation will be 2 minutes in length or will be a leisurely time of enjoying the sound of one another’s voices.
I can tell whether this particular conversation will be a rushed exchange of, “Just the facts, ma’m. Only the facts.”
Or if the long desired conversation will be a time of volleying back and forth … of listening … of crying and laughing.
How I long for the latter … but I will settle for the former.
I will settle for the former because I am the mom and any exchange of words and information is a comfort to me.
But, oh! How I long for the latter!
I long for an uninterrupted consultation of prayer requests, sweet stories and heart to heart sharing.
That is what a parent’s heart always longs for.
We ache to talk to our kids day or night.
Early or late.
Convenient or inconvenient.
Long or short.
It doesn’t matter with whom I am having lunch … what deadline I am facing … or how involved I am in any important project … but when I see one of my kids’ names on my cell phone … everything else is instantly dropped and sometimes forgotten.
I have a feeling that God, the Father, responds much the same ways as Carol, the mother does.
He aches to speak with us. He aches to listen to us.
And He is waiting lovingly for our call.
Now … another aspect of a vital and life-giving conversation is which participant does the talking and which participant does the listening?
If one person does all the talking without taking a breath it is not actually a conversation. It is a soliloquy. It is a monologue.
It is one-sided. It is selfish. It is boring.
A healthy conversation always contains give and take … words and silence … questions and answers … conundrums and advice.
Do you know what this mother’s heart does when one of my children say, “Mom … I called to get some advice. What do you think?”
Do you know the absolute joy in this mother’s heart when one of my children actually ask for and then lean into my advice and counsel?
Touche’.
‘Nuff said.
I hope that you “get” the correlation. It’s rather obvious.
The heart of God is waiting for your phone call. He does indeed have some wisdom to speak into your life. He is aching for you to begin the conversation.
God has input … and advice … and knowledge … and perspective … that you need more than you realize. But like a distracted child, you remain immersed in self-appointed productivity … and meetings … and busyness … and horizontal conversations.
He longs to speak with you and to you … is it your desperate need to listen to Him today?
I have an audacious desire to hear the voice of God and I will set aside every distraction, every deceptive priority and every earthly interference in order to hear from heaven.
Speak Lord, Your servant is listening.
