Listen 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.
In seeking to understand God, is this an understanding of God in the head or an understanding of God in the heart? How does one move forward when they understand God and His love in the head and can listen with the head, but there seems to be other junk in the heart that seems to keep them from listening with the heart?
We pray to listen with the heart as God speaks God’s love to us. As we sit before God, the junk in the heart is examined and the offer is made to place the junk at the foot of the cross. God provides that wonderful healing in Christ. The Book of Hebrews invites us to “lay aside” all of those things that would hold us back from experiencing the full love of God that is already there for us.