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Listen to God

A friend said to me the other day that he was frustrated because he kept praying and he didn’t feel that God was listening.  I said, “maybe it isn’t God who isn’t listening.” 

 We have this tendency to want to tell God what God should be doing.  In my mind, that is a form of idolotry.  Who am I to tell God what God is to do?  Our call is to listen.

 St. Benedict says it well in the first lines of the prologue to his rule, “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.  Benedict goes on to say, “The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience.  This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord.”

And so as times become tough, rather than dictate to God we are invited to sit in God’s presence and listen to God.  To listen with the heart is the first step in ministry to self or others.  To listen with the heart is to seek to understand the other before engaging in dialog.  So, we seek to understand God before we prescribe what God is to do. 

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