By the Waters of Babylon –Ps 137:1
Two men were walking along a crowded city sidewalk. Suddenly, one of the men remarked, “Listen to the lovely sound of that cricket!!” The friend walking alongside him could not hear the cricket sound at all. He asked his companion how he could possibly detect the sound of a cricket amid the constant roar of the traffic, and the cacophony of voices and footsteps and horns and all the rest of the city sounds.
The first man, having been raised on a farm, had trained himself to hear the sounds of nature – but he did not have to explain. He simply pulled a quarter from his pocket, dropped it onto the sidewalk, and a dozen nearby people stopped suddenly and looked down to the sidewalk to search for the coin’s whereabouts. He then said, “We hear what we listen for.”
I think the same thing is true for you and me as we go about our daily lives, whether alone or in socially-distanced groups. There are so many voices crying out for our attention. When the voice of God calls out our name, his voice gets lost in a sea of other voices which are demanding equal time (or more). Other, sometimes louder and more insistent, voices demand our attention – sometimes we even welcome those other voices. We need to focus our attention, though, to be alert to the voice of God as he calls to us. We hear what we listen for.
