In the forty minutes I spent on the treadmill today at the gym, I watched CNN display headlines…………Iraqi government collapsing, 1.2 million Americans will forclose on their homes in the next two years, home foreclosures will bring on a worldwide recession, global warming is causing the world to self-destruct…….and on it went.  I thought to myself, no wonder people are stressed.

The situation was amplified by the fact that I was praying for someone, while on the treadmill, whose e-mail I had read just before leaving for the gym.  It was the panicked e-mail of a person overwhelmed with life’s issues while being surrounded by a group of nay-sayers.  I prayed, “God, how do we cope.”

God said, “he leads me beside the still waters.”  In the midst of it all, God provides.  Thanks be to God.

A friend said to me the other day that he was frustrated because he kept praying and he didn’t feel that God was listening.  I said, “maybe it isn’t God who isn’t listening.” 

 We have this tendency to want to tell God what God should be doing.  In my mind, that is a form of idolotry.  Who am I to tell God what God is to do?  Our call is to listen.

 St. Benedict says it well in the first lines of the prologue to his rule, “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.  Benedict goes on to say, “The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience.  This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord.”

And so as times become tough, rather than dictate to God we are invited to sit in God’s presence and listen to God.  To listen with the heart is the first step in ministry to self or others.  To listen with the heart is to seek to understand the other before engaging in dialog.  So, we seek to understand God before we prescribe what God is to do.