Listen

We talk all the time.

We want God to hear our prayers, so we have this list of things we must do so that He will hear us. We do our devotions and check off our sins to get ourselves clean enough to go to Him with a barrage of our requests, always tacking on the necessary "if it's Your will," never mind the fact that we haven't even stopped to wonder if what we're praying is something that He would want.

We claim verses about His answers to prayer as promises that He will give us what we want if we just believe hard enough and pray together.

Oh, and then there's the other side of the spectrum, where we don't talk to God because He failed us. He's just not believable because He didn't answer our prayer for something we *really* wanted. So if we talk to Him at all, it's to tell Him that He's a miserable failure as God, and we simply don't want to believe in Him.

Two weeks ago, Pete and I passed a sign on our way home from my parents' house. The sign, a simple lighted church sign, carried a message that went deep into my heart. It was a cry from God's heart, I think.

"Listen to Me. -God."

That was all it said. Nothing big, nothing profound. But my spirit bowed in shame as the Holy Spirit inside my heart cried out with all the longing behind those words of a God who longs to know my heart. I was suddenly reminded that this God I demand satisfaction from and try to measure up to created me as I am, and He thinks I'm beautiful. I was reminded that prayer is not just petition, and that talking to God is not all that is involved in prayer.

Prayer is a listening too. Prayer--it is the means God gave us to commune with Him here on earth until we can see Him in person in Heaven. When our hearts are poured out before Him, we are open to hear His voice in answer to the burdens of our lives.

So finally, I wait, learning again to slow down and listen to His heart--in Scripture, and in my spirit as He teaches me through His Holy Spirit.