The Fruit of Listening

Hmmm. I toyed with the idea of posting a comment about the post-Christian shift we saw in yesterday's election, but instead I will pass along a link to my friend, Larry Silverman's comments which you can see here. On my part I want to write some more about listening to God.

I am more convinced than ever that our culture is not being transformed because God's people have lost intimacy with Him and the listening to Him that nurtures that intimacy and the fruit it brings. Instead of fixing the eyes of our heart on Papa, we instead live our lives almost entirely on our own initiative. When we make the shift to a listening life style, however, incredible things happen in us and through us. Consider a couple of stories.

This past week my friend Ken, who is a listener extraordinaire, was waiting for his connection in Chicago when he "noticed" a lady who was reading The Shack. His careful listening (to Papa God and to the woman) led him into a two hour conversation with a woman who had no initial interest in God. The conversation ended with Ken being able to encourage this woman towards God via reading The Shack and with his promise to pray for her as she did. This kind of God-incidence happens all the time for him. Another story that comes to mind is also a travel story. Someone I know was on a flight from Burbank to Dallas and heard God him that a certain lady coming down the aisle would be receiving His touch through him. Sure enough the lady say down next to him. When he asked Papa how to enter a conversation with her, He said, "Ask her to tell you her story." When he did so, this young woman, an actress and acting coach, poured out her pain, explaining that she was on her way to her home to see her estranged father who had suffered a major stroke. She was typically suspicious of "Christians" but because of his listening to her and to God, by the time the plane was descending for landing he asked her if he could pray for her and she literally leaned into him, head to head, as she said "Yes!" She then walked to her gate clinging to him, left him her contact information, etc. And I could add many, many stories of my own to this because this to me is the "normal Christian life."

But how many of us have a relationship with Papa that is so intimate that we are able to live like this all the time? How many of us instead live most of life almost entirely on our own initiative? And what kind of fruit does that bear?

I close with this poignant and parallel thought from Thomas Kelly in A Testament of Devotion (pp. 96-97). I have updated the language slightly.

"the sense of (God's) Presence carries within it a sense of our lives being in large part guided, dynamically moved from beyond our usual selves. Instead of being the active, hurrying church worker and anxious, careful planner of shrewd moves toward the good life, we become pliant creatures, less brittle, less obstinately rational. The energizing, dynamic center is not in us but in the Divine Presence in which we share....The sooner we stop thinking we are the energetic operators of religion and discover that God is at work, as the Aggressor, the Invader, the Initiator, so much the sooner do we discover that our task is to call men to be still and know, listen, hearken in quiet invitation to the subtle promptings of the Divine....too many people are so preoccupied with the clatter of effort to do something for God that they don't hear Him asking that He might do something through them."

That's it for now. I could write much more, describing many instances of incredible fruitfulness for those who have learned to listen, but perhaps you can add your own stories. For me, my life is one continuing story like this! I can never go back to living on my own initiative!

Listening and living loved so that I may love others as I live,

Tom, Abba's little boy