What It Sometimes Takes to Listen

Once, leading a retreat for a church group in the rugged terrain of Texas hill country, I taught about listening prayer—the practice of leaving space in our talking with God for guidance or new insight.

And then I gave this assignment: For the next ten or fifteen minutes, I said, go out into the open spaces or trails outside our building, or find a quiet corner here in the retreat center, and pray this simple phrase, a phrase found in the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel: “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”

“Just say that phrase again and again,” I said. “Let it be a prayer to quiet your heart, to help you better to hear.”

Once back, I had folks debrief and reflect out loud on their experience under a brilliant sun, how they had managed reciting the simple phrase.

I will never forget one woman’s comment.

“I went out repeating the prayer,” she explained. “But I soon realized that I was saying not “your servant is listening,” but “Speak, Lord, your servant is missing.”

We all chuckled, knowing that that could have been any of us, at least some days. “I see now,” she said, “how what I prayed was truer than I knew. I wasn’t fully present to God.”

Sometimes, even when I am trying to concentrate and pray, I feel distracted. I will forget to turn to God with my whole heart and wide-open ears.

But we are not left to our own devices when it comes to understanding what God expects through the roads and detours and dark stretches of our lives. With practice, we learn to listen to what Thomas Kelly called the “welling-up whispers” of God’s guidance and presence, the still, small voice that nudges or clarifies, when our own ingenuity cannot carry the day.

“Put the ear of my heart next to your lips,” prayed Augustine.

This week I want that to be more my own prayer. I think lots of people might when they get still enough to think about it. We may have to pause at times through the day to do that. But then, perhaps only then, will we seize the opportunities God can open up as we make ourselves present, and able to obey.

Photo by Larry George II on Unsplash