SLOW DOWN AND SAY IT AGAIN
THE younger members of our family have already got the habit of speaking very quickly in my company and elsewhere which leaves me asking them all too often to slow down and say it again.
I do know that while my hearing is pretty good and helped by my ears being syringed recently, as you get older you tend to pick up all too easily peripheral noise from others around you and sometimes it can take three or even more requests to people speaking to you to slow down and speak that bit more clearly and directly to you.
And ideally without local dialect or slang as I am picking up new meanings to old words. Have you ever been ‘patched’?
It is always important in any sphere in life, to speak so that others listening to you clearly hear what you are saying and any inferences from the details.
It is always so easy to act on what you thought a person had said to you, rather than what they did say, which can result in unhelpful results and embarrassment.
When it comes to what God wants to say to each of us, it’s very important that we can hear him clearly and be in no doubt about what He’s saying.
That only comes by paying attention, seeking Him out in quiet places where there is nothing or very little to disturb you.
If we are ever out of sorts and caught up only with our own lives with their complexities and challenges, and we will have these, we will find it hard to listen out and hear God’s voice.
If we have wandered far from Him, that makes it even more difficult.
Yet He remains wanting to be a part of our lives and to commission us to live out our lives for Him. And if we are called to be His voice to others around us, it’s even more important that we stay near to His heart and hear even a whisper from Him as this could affect for good those to whom God has called us to serve.
So, at this time when there is so much wrong in the world, and such poverty that some of us have never known, we need to be God’s hands and His feet helping and speaking to all we know who will listen. For those hellbent on destruction, we need to pray that they will see a better way and come to faith.