Can you hear me now?

Yesterday was Palm Sunday. This was the day that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a doinkey colt. Whoops! I mean Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey colt. Can you imagine all the people shouting as he rode into town? I have a picture in my head of that.

Can you imagine yourself in that picture with all sorts of shouting all around you? Can you imagine yourself in just a crowd of people anywhere? Let's take this down a level. Can you imagine yourself sitting in your room with headphones on and blaring music playing out of those headphones?

While I can imagine all those things, the one I can most relate to is sitting in my room with headphones on and blaring music coming from my mp3 player or my computer.

Now can you imagine silence? Does the idea of silence scare you? Does it seem like an uncomfortable idea to you?

It was uncomfortable to me yesterday when the first part of the sermon started out with silence and a powerpoint about silence.

If you ask me, silence is kinda an unsettling idea. I find it almost eerie to be in complete silence. Why? I'm around so much sound that I'm not used to the idea of silence unless I'm asleep.

The problem with being around too much sound all the time is that you may not know what God is saying to you. You might say to God with headphones on, yeah I'm listening God, but are you really hearing what He's saying to you?

My pastor used a different example yesterday in his sermon, but when I was thinking about writing this, I thought of the Verizon commercials.

Can you hear me now? I think God may be asking this to some of us today.

For no known reason yesterday after getting home from church, I decided not to listen to my music. It really opened my ears. I was hearing things that I had never heard before. It had me almost eavesdropping on my brother. What? He was making weird noises and I heard more than one pair of feet run down the stairs. I don't even want to know what he and possibly his girlfriend were doing upstairs yesterday.

Today I also decided to take a little bit of silence. It wasn't that hard yesterday, but it has been really challenging today and I have listened to some music today, but in order to really think about this blog, I just had to turn off the music.

Sometimes we just need to sit in silence and really listen for God. We need to tell God what Eli told Samuel to say. We need to say to God, "Speak, for your servant is listening." And we really need to listen.

Don't go pretending you're listening. You know, like putting sunglasses over your eyes to hide the fact that you're really sleeping. Yeah, God can see right through that.

Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver. Have you ever seen that on a shirt or heard it somewhere? Sometimes I wonder if God just wants to put duct tape on our mouths to shut us up and make us listen.

That wouldn't be a bad thing for me. All I seem to do during prayer is talk to God. I'm not saying you're not supposed to talk during prayer to God, but talking should not take up the whole prayer time. Talking is only half of prayer. Listening is the other half and if not half, it should be most of it.

We should know this is a bad thing when I know that I should be listening, but I'm talking a mile a minute. Right now I can imagine that. And while I'm talking a mile a minute, I imagine God waving His hand in front of my face trying to get me to stop talking. Can you hear me now?

Last night, I couldn't seem to shut up. I couldn't even turn my mind off. As usual, it was running a mile a minute as well. So when I said to God that I was going to shut up and just listen, I had a really hard time with that.

Listening is a skill that I apparently don't have right now very well. At least it's not very disciplined. And getting my ears flushed out hasn't really helped. But Rome was not built in a day. So I must have faith and continue practicing this listening skill and telling my mind to stop thinking and just listen.

What is God trying to tell you today? Can you hear Him? Clogged ears might be a physical problem, but it probably isn't your spiritual problem. Can you hear God now?