God speaks constantly, but God usually refuses to yell to get our attention.Contemplation—training ourselves to be still and listen for God’s voice—seems to be a lost art in our world, but if we truly want to hear from God, it is one we must rediscover.Lent is a good time to focus on listening for God's voice in our lives…

Twenty-one months ago in May 2008 my twin daughters Hope and Rebecca were born…and two days later Hope passed from life support to life eternal. In the ensuing months, my family lived through a series of other hardships in short order. Living through all these events has shaken me to my core and has had a profound impact on how I think about and interact with God. It’s hard to put in words how I have been changed by these experiences, but I think it’s fair to say that I am in the process of learning a new language to talk to God.

The pace of my life—two small children, a full-time job, plus ministry involvement—has not made it easy to find time to process all that we lived through. Our busy life has made finding extended time to really be still and listen for what God might be “saying” through all of this pain and hardship seemingly impossible at times.

That’s why it was such a blessing when my wife organized a surprise weekend away for my 39th birthday last November. For three days, we could step away from our routine and our responsibilities and focus solely on one another… and on God. One of my favorite ways to connect with God is to take a prayer walk through nature. Having two small children, I rarely can do it anymore, but on this occasion, I got a chance to take an extended walk. Part of the reflection below began as a journal entry I compiled on that walk…

The noise of traffic is drowning out the songbird’s song

Your voice inside us, telling us that we’ve gone wrong…

—“Song of Remorse”, Songs for a Revolution of Hope, Brian McLaren

Looking back, I think I came to the wilderness that day hoping to hear God’svoice afresh…

I am quite sure God has never once stopped speaking to me these past two years, but I have had a lot of trouble hearing—so God has seemed pretty quiet from my perspective. I hoped this weekend away might help me regain my bearings.…

The autumn leaves crunched beneath my feet as I walked along the trail. It was a grey November day today; the sky above was overcast and it was quite chilly—I knew these were the waning days of fall in Pennsylvania; soon winter snows would blanket these woods. The trees above are already mostly barren. A slight breeze rustled through the forest canopy above me.

In the distance I heard the noises of civilization—lowing cattle, crowing roosters, and human voices from a farm not far away, and the seemingly ubiquitous drone of traffic from the highway a little further in the distance. But I knew these weren’t the voices I was looking for, so I pushed onward and inward…

I came to a field on the edge of the property where we were staying, and I stopped. The ground was damp from yesterday’s rain and yet I feel compelled to sit. As I quieted myself I became aware of a voice in the canopy above me—a bird sitting in one of the trees along the edge of the field was singing a beautiful song.

And as I continued to sit and listen, my bottom slightly damp from the wet leaves beneath me, I started to perceive that the song I heard was actually made up of more than one voice. I realized that I was probably hearing not just one species of bird singing, but several—or perhaps males and females of the same species calling to each other. (I realized that a skilled bird watcher—who spends lots of time listening to birds—would be able to discern much more than I could just based on the voices he or she heard.)

But then after a while, even the bird songs seemed to fall away…and I became aware of another voice… The wind whispered through the forest canopy and had it’s own unique sound. I couldn’t really “hear” it until I became very still. It was like a gentle whisper. I wondered if that was the voice I was listening for?

The voice of the wind had been there all along on my journey into the forest that day. I noted it when I was walking along the path, but hardly gave it a second thought. It had gotten lost among all the other “louder” sounds competing for my attention. I couldn’t help but wonder: Had I made the same mistake as the Prophet Elijah made—1 Kings 19:11-13? Had I assumed the voice I had come to the wilderness looking for would be louder and more flashy, and thus almost missed God’s message? Had I been too quick to dismiss the gentle breeze as mere background noise and unimportant?

I think that God probably speaks volumes to us every day, but because we have not trained our “ears” to hear, we hear only a small fraction of what God actually wants to say to us… and to the world. Now I realize that being still is not easy to do in our modern world. The pace of life these days seems to defy finding meaningful time to just be still and listen for God’s voice. So much competes for our attention in our information-saturated culture; so many noises threaten to drown out the voice we most need to hear—namely the still small voice of God.

Indeed God speaks constantly, but my experience (and that of countless others from Scripture and history) suggests that God usually refuses to yell to get our attention. That means the impetus is on us to put forth the effort to hear God’s voice above all the noise of our daily lives. Contemplation—training ourselves to be still and listen for God’s voice—seems to be a lost art in our world, but if we truly want to hear from God, it is one we desperately need to rediscover.

Lent is a time to intentionally focus on listening for God’s voice—and especially on removing those things in from our life that hinder us from that listening.

We should ask God: What is impeding me (impeding our church community) from seeing and hearing You more clearly… and acting on what we’ve seen or heard? And our challenge is to stay with God long enough to get some answers… and to stay with God even when the answers we get are tough for us to hear—even answers we’d prefer to ignore.

I hope you and I can find time these next few weeks to be still and really listen to what God might be saying to us—as individuals and as communities. If you’ve never really tried listening for God’s voice before, it might seem hard at first, and you might not hear much. But I encourage you to stick with it—stay with God! Like anything we do, it gets easier with practice.

I hope we will also be open when God speaks to us in a manner we weren’t expecting, and that we won’t be too quick to dismiss the voice just because it wasn’t very flashy, or it came from an unlikely source, or it wasn’t what we expected to (or wanted to) hear.

God often speaks unexpected messages through the least likely of individuals and through unlikely means. My prayer for Lent echoes those of the Prophets, and of Jesus: that God would use whatever means necessary to get through to us, and that we would have eyes to see and ears to hear the message God delivers, no matter how unconventional the messenger may be.