God and the Verizon Guy

"Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. " Jeremiah 29: 12-13

I was watching television the other day and the Verizon commercial came on. You know the one. The geeky Verizon Guy saying "Can you hear me now?" Yep. That's the one. Anyway, I was watching the commercial when suddenly I realized that the Verizon guy reminded me of God. Yeah right, you say, but wait... The Verizon guy seems to be everywhere and he is always asking "Can you hear me now?" And he is surrounded by an army of people who follow him and are there to help you to hear him better. Who else do we know like that.... Yeah, now you're thinking... God is always around. He talks to us all the time. He has an army of people who follow Him who are there to support us as we try to hear Him better.

The bible says that if we really seek God we will find Him. Think about it. Lots of people talk to God, or at least ask Him questions. Especially people who don't even really believe that He is out there. Something bad happens and they ask "why?" but they never seem to really listen for an answer. The bible says that if they would choose to really listen, that they would hear the answer. When we take time to be with God we call it quiet time. But a lot of the time we use that time to talk to God. Do we take the time to sit back and listen? Don't we usually hear the answers to our questions or at least some direction for our lives if we wait and listen for it? Yes. God speaks to us when we quiet down and listen for His voice. The voice is soft, sometimes it is very hard to hear. But it IS there, and when we hear it, we know we have heard it. Sometimes it is about us, but often it is not.

God sometimes guides us to pray for a certain person or situation. Sometimes He instructs us to do something that we hadn't even considered as an option or He may ask us to avoid something that we had planned to do. We need to quiet down our lives and our minds and spend some serious time just listening for whatever God wants to tell us. And if we aren't sure, we can run it by one of the "soldiers from the army of God", our sisters and brothers in the Lord, and they can help us to discern the validity of the message. That is one of the benefits of good fellowship.

So now having thought about it a bit, can't you also see how the Verizon guy is a reminder of how God is always there for us. And now won't the commercials be a reminder to really quiet down and listen for the "still small voice of God" in our lives. It's got to make you wonder...

Dear Lord, please help my friends and I to spend more time listening for Your voice and help us to recognize the voice as Yours. I pray that we seek You with everything that we are and that as the bible says You will make Yourself known to us... And please help those family members and friends who don't really believe that You are there, help them to actually listen for You when they are asking You the "why" questions. Let them seek You, and listen for Your voice, and may it make a difference in their lives as it has in ours.