Tag: listening to God

He leads the dance

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1-chronicles-16

At three-years-old, my son is a movie theater pro.

He knows how this whole movie-watching thing goes.

“I get glasses.” (We’ve seen some 3D movies lately).

“I get popcorn.”  (We love movie theater popcorn!!)

“I sit in the big chair and be quiet and watch the movie.”

Yes, sir.  That’s how it works all right.

Only this time we weren’t going to see a 3D movie, so we messed with his routine a little.

No special funky glasses to play with during the movie?

Surely the 3D glasses are an intrinsic part of the movie experience!

Fortunately, we arrived at the movie theater and he didn’t protest when we headed into the dark theater sans glasses.  He just happily munched on his popcorn.

My son went with the flow in a way I kind of envy because going with the flow is the hard thing for me.  I like things to be just so, the way they always are, the way I expect them to be.

But life and faith aren’t always so simple.

Sometimes you get the popcorn but not the glasses.  Or the glasses and not the popcorn.  Sometimes you sit in a movie theater with all the movie paraphernalia, but nothing shows on the screen.

Sometimes I follow five-step formulas of faith and don’t hear from God or fulfill every religious obligation and still feel spiritually dehydrated and dying of thirst.

That’s because faith is relational and relationships can be messy and hard to define.  They can’t always be crammed into facts, figures, and formulas.

Relationships take effort because they are dynamic and changing, close and then distant and then close again…and my relationship with God is the same.

Jeremiah 29:13 tells us:

You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.

What does it look like to seek God with all my heart instead of just half my attention or a little of my focus?

It means I’m willing to wait and willing to listen.

I’m willing to be honest and tell God where I’ve gone wrong, how I’m hurting, and the places where I’m clinging to unsurrendered disappointment.

I feast on His Word and rest in His presence because just being near Him helps.

It means waking up in the middle of the night and hashing it out with Him in a heart-to-heart instead of counting sheep.

Maybe God purposely keeps us on our toes so we’re drawn into this wholehearted search for Him because He knows we’re distracted.

When Elijah ran in desperate fear from Queen Jezebel, he ended up at Mount Horeb–the very same holy mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments.

Elijah sojourned to the”mountain of God” to have his own personal God-encounter.

There in that sacred space, he witnessed an earthquake, but God wasn’t in the earthquake.

He saw fire, but God wasn’t in the fire.

Instead, God showed up “in the  sound of a low whisper” (1 Kings 19:12 ESV).

There’s more to this than just the superficial lesson that “God speaks in a still small voice so be quiet enough to listen.”

Sure, that’s often true.

Life can be loud, far too loud for us to reflect, think, listen, or pray with reflection.

But that’s not all there is here.

God didn’t speak to Elijah from a storm or earthquake.  Truth.

But He did speak to Job that way.

Then the LORD spoke to Job out of the storm. Job 38:1 NIV

And no, God didn’t speak to Elijah from the fire, but He did to Moses.

the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush (Exodus 3:2 ESV).

God whispers sometimes and sometimes he doesn’t.  Sometimes He speaks in storms or from the midst of the flame.

All through Scripture, we see this isn’t about methods or venues; it’s about God speaking however He chooses to speak.

If I’m not hearing Him, I can throw my whole heart into listening, allowing Him to speak how He chooses instead of expecting Him to stick to my relational plan.  To show up on my timetable. To discuss what I want to discuss.  To answer the way I’d like.

Maybe this time I need to watch the movie without the glasses.

Maybe another day I’ll need to wear the glasses to see the whole picture.

It’s not always the same.  So I let Him lead in this relational dance.

And I hold on to one beautiful promise:

And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. Hebrews 11:6 ESV

When we draw near, we must believe that God does indeed reward the wholehearted seeker.

I just keep seeking.

 

Complicating Grace

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We had given them instructions.

While I was away all day at a conference in Richmond, Dad was on duty for swim lessons and a friend’s birthday party and everything in between.

So, I prepped my daughters in advance with specific instructions because you have to go through the bathrooms at the gym in order to reach the pool.  One dad…three daughters….suddenly this whole 003job becomes more complicated.

“Now, you can’t change at the pool after swim lessons,” I told them.  “You just need to slip your cover-up on over your swimsuits and quickly move through the bathroom to the other side where Dad will be waiting for you. He’ll take you home where you can change.”

He told them the same thing.

So, 20 minutes after he sent them through the bathroom after swim lessons, they finally emerged.

Fully dressed.

Mostly.

Because we had planned this all out, I hadn’t packed them underwear to change into after swim class.  They were, after all, supposed to wear their swim suits home.

I can only imagine what every other woman in the gym bathroom witnessed as these three girls tried to change into clothes and discovered a lack of undergarments.

Oh my.

Fortunately, a mom we know had pity on my youngest and at least gave her a plastic bag for her wet swimsuit.  This is what my daughter told me as soon as I arrived home that night.

“How were swim lessons?” I asked.

“Good.  Natalie’s mom gave me a plastic bag.”

Okay….

They must have struggled through wet clothes and changing in a public bathroom and searching frantically through the clothes for the things they needed and then had to makeshift a solution when they found their resources were lacking.

But if they had listened to us, yes, if they had just listened and obeyed the simple instructions we’d given, they would have had everything they needed.  It would have been so simple.

And I take this to heart.

Yes, if I just listen to my God—all-knowing, all-powerful, so gracious and loving—then perhaps I wouldn’t struggle with so much insufficiency and lack, perhaps the situations that threaten to drown me in frantic worry and desperate searching would be simplified and peace-filled.

Yet, sometimes I’m just not listening.

And sometimes I’m listening; I’m just not obeying.

Either way, I create havoc.

I’m not alone in this, I know.  God granted Solomon supernatural wisdom, and yet the vast kingdom he inherited from his father, King David, disintegrated when Solomon died.

All because he didn’t listen.

God gave such clear instructions for the kings of Israel:

However, he (the king) must not acquire many horses for himself or send the people back to Egypt to acquire many horses, for the Lord has told you, ‘You are never to go back that way again.’ He must not acquire many wives for himself so that his heart won’t go astray. He must not acquire very large amounts of silver and gold for himself (Deuteronomy 17:16-17).

Three simple commands:

1. Don’t have too many horses (especially ones you get from Egypt, where you were once enslaved).

2. Don’t have many wives (especially those who will lead your heart astray).

3. Don’t build up extreme personal wealth.

Perhaps the rules seemed so arbitrary, even unfair, and certainly not fun.  All the other kings, I’m sure, married for political alliances, acquired wealth and then showed it off, and maintained stables with pride.

Why not Solomon and the kings of Israel?

The Bible Knowledge Commentary notes that “All three prohibitions, then, were designed to reduce the king to the status of a servant totally dependent on His Master, the Lord.”

God planned for his king’s heart to be humbled, for him to remember Who would deliver him in battle and Who would provide for his needs.

Sadly, Solomon doesn’t have a reputation for wisdom alone.  No, he’s known for opulence, and his 700 wives (plus 300 concubines), who led him to worship foreign gods and stone idols.

And his horses.

We’re told: “Solomon had 4,000 stalls for his chariot horses, and he had 12,000 horses” (1 Kings 4:26).  Not only that, but Solomon’s horses came from Egypt (2 Chronicles 1:16).

Lisa Harper writes:

“grace can masquerade as difficulty and discipline”(Malachi).

So it was for malachiSolomon.  This was grace in disguise and he missed it, missed seeing through the mask of rules and restrictions to know that God was at work here.

And me, when I’m rushing and not listening, or listening and not heeding, how can I see grace for the grace it is?

Instead, I’m begging, “Mercy,” and this mercy He’s already given.

I still my heart to listen.

I steel my heart to obey.

And grace is what I see.

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in the Fall of 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

Tap-Dancing and Life

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She tossed open the box from Payless and snatched out the two shiny black shoes with metal plates on the bottom.

Tap shoes: Her little six-year-old heart’s great desire! She slipped her feet in and immediately started performing.

Then my eight-year-old crammed her feet into the shoes and put on a grand show.  My three-year-old even stepped into the shoes and shuffled round the kitchen a bit.012

They were like magic shoes, all shiny and loud, and they transformed any girl into a superstar on a grand stage.

On the first day of tap lessons, my girl clip-clopped her way into the dance studio along with the other excited students. I heard them take those first steps onto the wooden floor, hesitant at first, and then heard them break into freestyle tap routines of their own.

How could they resist?  This studio and those magic shoes made them all feel like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire.  It was inspiration and joy and visions of grandeur accompanied by tip-tapping rhythm.

Then the lessons began, and the order to contain the disorder…the structure, the routine, the method to the madness.

It’s a slow realization for a kid, but eventually it comes: tap dancing doesn’t just mean slamming your feet on the floor in any combination of athletic flailing you choose.

You have to practice.

Bummer.

You have to watch and listen and then move in just the right way.  You have to drill and rehearse and repeat.

For a week, I asked my daughter to “shuffle” and “flap,” and practice, practice, practice.  Then, because I know absolutely nothing at all about tap dancing, I asked her if she was doing it right (because, after all, how was I to know?).

She rolled her eyes at me occasionally and huffed loudly at times, blowing her bangs up off her forehead in exasperation.

Reluctantly or not, though, she practiced.  When she returned to class and shuffled correctly and the teacher announced, “You all must have been practicing,” that was the reward.  My daughter beamed.

She loves tap, she declares.

Life and tap-dancing, they can convince us all at times that inspiration is all we need.  They can woo us into running on spiritual and emotional highs.  We’re at our best.  It’s fun and grand (and noisy perhaps).  And the lessons and the practice come easy.

Quiet times are easy, too, when God is speaking so clearly we can hear His voice ringing in our ears. When that time with Him is overflowing, it’s no great discipline to carry our bucket to the Well.

And we have these seasons with Him, where we’re hearing and learning and it’s thrilling to be used and useful, to see ministry grow and faith deepen, to see prayers answered and miracles happen, to read God’s Word and actually feel it tingling in our souls.

It’s a slow realization for us, perhaps, but eventually it comes: This walk with God isn’t always easy and the emotions and the highs and the results we expect aren’t always immediate or obvious.

Truly, it’s discipline.

It’s waking up, pouring that cup of tea and opening up that Bible not because it feels so good, but because this is how we grow over time.

It’s going to church even when the sermon isn’t about your needs and singing even on days when it’s hard to really mean the words on the screen.

It’s praying even when you don’t sense the connection and it feels like silent heaven and empty air.

It’s committing to Bible study even when you’re busy, tired, distracted, complacent and just downright don’t feel like it.

Yes, it’s practice and rehearsing, repeating, growing slow and steady, committing and then choosing not to give up–not today, not tomorrow, not a week from now.

It’s feeling the desperation of the deer panting after water and heading to the stream even when it’s elusive and difficult to find.

And like, Elijah, it’s listening for God’s voice even in despondency, depression and despair.  He stood on that mountain and listened for God.  Even after the mighty wind passed by, the earthquake ceased shaking, and the fire abated, still Elijah listened.

He could have given up: God’s not speaking.  I couldn’t see Him in the big and the obvious, the glorious and spectacular, the emotional or the ear-shattering.

He could have headed back into the cave and abandoned the effort.

And then he would have missed it.

No, Elijah continued to stand, waiting, listening, still.

And God spoke.

Sometimes it’s there in the quiet that we hear God simply because we haven’t given up.  We’ve continued to stand in His presence beyond the silence, faithfully and determinedly waiting…listening…still.

Beyond the point of inspiration, fun, glory, and ease, we discipline ourselves to listen.  And so we hear.

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in the Fall of 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

“Terrific, Terrific, Terrific” and Why The Goose Repeats Herself

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But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.
James 1:22

My daughter’s teacher just finished reading Charlotte’s Web to her first grade class and my girl came home with one important question about the book.

“Mom,” she said as she climbed in my lap, “there’s something I just don’t understand about it.”

I prepared to offer deep words of wisdom to whatever philosophical question she posed.  Why did the spider have to die? What made Charlotte and Wilbur such good friends?  Why was Wilbur worth saving?  Why did only some of Charlotte’s babies stay in the barn after they hatched?

Why aren’t we vegetarians?

Instead, she asked, “Why does the goose talk that way?”

Hmmm.  Surely, the mama goose in Charlotte’s Web does have a particular speech pattern.  She never says anything once.  When the animals are debating hotly over what new word Charlotte the spider needs to spin into her web in order to save Wilbur the pig’s life, the goose suggests, “terrific, terrific, terrific.”

Because one “terrific” is never enough.

And how should an ordinary barn spider spell such a large vocabulary word?

According to the goose, it’s, “T double-E double-R double-R double-I double-F double-I double C, C, C!” (E.B.White, Charlotte’s Web).

At first, when my daughter asked me to explain why someone would talk so funny, I mumbled something about how people talk in different ways and everyone is unique, something that sounded intellectual enough to impress her and qualify me for “Wise Mom of the Year.”

Later that night, though, I listened to the way I talked to my kids and had a life-changing epiphany.

The goose always repeated everything she said because . . . she was a mom.  Perhaps she had been repeating herself to her goslings so long, she began to talk that way perpetually.

Yes, I myself find that I don’t ever get to say anything once.  Usually it takes three times before my children even realize I’m talking.  So, typically my announcements sound something like this:

Time to brush your teeth.
Okay, it’s really time to brush your teeth!!!!!
TIME TO BRUSH YOUR TEETH!!!!!!!!!!

By the time I’ve tripled my statement, my middle girl finally looks up from the couch and wonders why I’m in her face with my voice raised (usually holding her chin so she’s forced to make eye contact with me).

It’s not that I’m prone to yell or enjoy being loud or even generally live with the volume turned up.

It’s that unless I’m loud, she’s not listening.

By the time I’ve reached my third repeat, my middle daughter always looks surprised and excuses her lack of obedience by saying, “Oh, I didn’t hear you.”

To which I explain that my voice trumps all other voices and all other noise.  The moment she hears my voice making any sound at all, she needs to focus on what I’m saying, which requires her to stop looking at the TV, cease listening to her music, put down the book, and pause for a moment while playing with her toys.

This has all made me wonder whether God ever has to combat my own inattentiveness with repetitive messages and some volume-raising.

Is that what He’s doing when I hear the same lesson from every radio preacher, sermon, Sunday School lesson, Bible Study chapter, and devotional reading?  Is that what He’s doing when He escalates His discipline in my life, all because I’ve tuned out initial warnings and overlooked His initially gentle correction?

Does this happen because we’re not listening?  And if it does, then the challenge to us is to focus on His voice immediately, turning away from all other sources of noise, every life distraction, every demand of busyness, and responding with Samuel’s, ” Speak, Lord, for your servant hears” (1 Samuel 3:9).

Ultimately, though, this isn’t just about our ears sensing the ripples of God’s voice or even our mind evaluating the sound waves and forming the complex audio signals into words.

It’s not enough to hear.  It’s not so much whether or not my daughter hears me the first time I declare that teeth brushing should commence. The issue is whether or not she bounces up from the couch, walks to the bathroom, squeezes the toothpaste onto the toothbrush and actually brushes her teeth the moment she hears my command.

This is what matters to God, as well.  This is why when God gave His people the commandments, He said, “Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them“ (Deut. 6:3, ESV).

Even more significant is the fact that the Hebrew word most often translated as “obey” in Scripture is “shema,” or “hear”  (Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus by Lois Tverberg, p. 29).

Since “hear” and “obey” are generally the same word in Hebrew, Tverberg says “to hear is to do, to be obedient” (p.29)  God expected them to be the one and the same action—we hear/we obey.  It’s as simple as that.

So, when Jesus sounded a little like the Charlotte’s Web goose whenever He made one of His favorite announcements: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear,” what He really was saying was:

“If you hear what I’m saying, then obey it, do it, live it, put it into practice”
(Matthew 11:15, Luke 8:8, Matt. 13:43, Mark 4:9, Luke 14:35).

I once heard a college friend  pray, “Please teach me gently, Lord.  Don’t bruise me.”  Oh, how I have prayed this same prayer!!!  None of us seek out God’s discipline or firm hand of correction or even the raising of His voice when we decline to listen.

Yet, if we desire God’s gentleness, His loving guidance, His soft hand resting on our shoulder, then we must live a responsive life.

Our spirits discerning.  Our hearts receptive.  Our lives obedient.  This is how we respond to God, moving gently and without resistance to His instruction just as a blade of grass shifting with the wind.  God speaks.  We listen.  We obey.   As simple as that.

You can read other devotionals on this topic here:

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer for www.myfrienddebbie.com and worship leader.  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2012 Heather King