Listening

I settle into my favorite chair with a small blanket over my legs. I close my eyes, relax my shoulders and take a few deep breaths. First, I hear the old clock ticking in the next room. The coffee maker beeps its last warning. A little dog pads over, jumps up and snuggles up against my right hip. She stretches, breathes a little squeak and is content. Tick, tock, tick tock. My breathing finds a rhythm with the clock. The chime on the back patio add a soft staccato to the song.

Listening is like finding a rhythm, learning to balance with another, getting in tune with your environment, it adds a narrowing or broadening of focus. As a child I remember listening to my heartbeat as I lay in bed at night, with my mom vacuuming downstairs.

When my brothers and I would stay at our grandparents farm, there was a new landscape of sound. Summer evenings always meant the windows were open and the crickets of the night had enormous effect in the relative stillness. In between their chorus, the night was as black as the stillness was quiet. The quiet would be broken by my grandfather walking down the hallway on the creaky wood floors of that old farmhouse until he settled into bed and all was deliciously quiet again. Until the crickets found a new song they insisted we learn.

In Luke chapter 9, it says “A voice came from the cloud, saying “This is my Son, whom I have chosen, listen to him.” In John chapter 10, “The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” And 1 John 4:6 tells us “We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us.”

Listening is a gift. Listening is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible and we are invited to listen to God. Perhaps listening to God is not dissimilar to listening in these quiet moments. God is always reaching out and communicating to us and we have the choice to listen to Him or listen to the world.

This devotion was written by Patty Forsberg, one of Sheridan’s Women’s Ministry Team members, as a way to bring encouragement to the hearts and minds of our sisters in Christ to KNOW, LOVE and SERVE God.