Hearing and talking to people around the world via "ham" radio is not as simple as picking up the phone, dialling their number and talking away, instead you have to tune into the correct frequency, hope that you can hear the other person, hope that they can hear you and hope that the signal doesn't fade away.
A radio frequency is the number of times a radio wave gets repeated at a specific modulation. We are able to receive a radio station as long as we stay within the designated frequency.
Something similar happens with prayer and in this story (1 Samuel 3. 1 - 21) we see Samuel learning to tune himself in to the “God” channel in such a way that he can regularly hear from God. The story starts in a place and time where the people of God rarely hear from God - “In those days, when the boy Samuel was serving the Lord under the direction of Eli, there were very few messages from the Lord, and visions from him were quite rare.”
The problem though, I suggest, did not lie with God, because God is always communicating – always sending messages to human beings. No, the problem wasn’t that God had stopped speaking; the problem was that the people had stopped listening. They weren’t tuned in to the “God” channel and instead were listening to other channels and on other frequencies.
In fact this is true for us too. One way of thinking about what happens when people become Christians is that they have retuned their minds and spirits so that instead of listening on the selfish, self-centred frequencies to which we are naturally tuned in, we have retuned so that we are now listening to God.
Eli tells Samuel to say to God, “Speak; your servant is listening.” For Samuel to say, “Speak” means that he has an attitude of expectancy that God will speak and to say, “your servant is listening” means that he has an attitude of attentiveness and willing to act on what he hears from God. These are the attitudes that we need if we are to hear frequently from God – expectation that he will speak, attentiveness to what he says, and the readiness to take to heart and act on what he says.
The Bible suggests that God speaks in a myriad of different ways: through nature, through other people, through scripture, through everyday tasks and actions, through thoughts and ideas, through dreams and visions, through prayer, through worship, through inspired languages, through circumstances, through signs. The list could go on and on. Some of the ways in which he speaks seem to us to be supernatural and others very ordinary. It doesn’t matter how we hear him, it just matters that we do.
One way in which we can do this is to consciously try to reflect on what we see, hear and do in the course of our daily lives. The Bible is full of encouragement to reflect. The words, reflect, consider, ponder, meditate and examine, crop up everywhere. God encourages us to reflect on everything; his words (2 Timothy 2.7), his great acts (1 Samuel 12.24), his statutes (Psalm 119.95), his miracles (Mark 6.52), Jesus (Hebrews 3.1), God's servants (Job 1.8), the heavens (Psalm 8.3), the plants (Matthew 6.28), the weak (Psalm 41.1), the wicked (Psalm 37.10), oppression (Ecclesiastes 4.1), labour (Ecclesiastes 4.4), the heart (Proverbs 24.12), our troubles (Psalm 9.13), our enemies (Psalm 25.19), our sins (2 Corinthians 13.5). Everything is up for reflection but we are guided by the need to look for the excellent or praiseworthy (Philippians 4.8) and to learn from whatever we see or experience (Proverbs 24.32).
Clearly all this reflection cannot take place just at specific times. Just as we are told to pray always, the implication of the Bible's encouragement to reflection is that we should reflect at all times. We need to make a habit of reflection, a habit of learning from experience and of looking for the excellent things.
Everything around us can potentially be part of our ongoing conversation with God, part of which is reflection. This is a style of prayer that may go back at least to the Celtic Christians. They had a sense of the heavenly being found in the earthly, particularly in the ordinary tasks of home and work, together with the sense that every task can be blessed if we see God in it.
David Adam, who has written many contemporary prayers in a Celtic style, says that:
“Much of Celtic prayer spoke naturally to God in the working place of life. There was no false division into sacred and secular. God pervaded all and was to be met in their daily work and travels. If our God is to be found only in our churches and our private prayers, we are denuding the world of His reality and our faith of credibility. We need to reveal that our God is in all the world and waits to be discovered there – or, to be more exact, the world is in Him, all is in the heart of God. Our work, our travels, our joys and our sorrows are enfolded in His loving care. We cannot for a moment fall out of the hands of God. Typing pool and workshop, office and factory are all as sacred as the church. The presence of God pervades the work place as much as He does a church sanctuary.” (Power Lines: Celtic Prayers about Work, SPCK, 1992)
We know that ordinary people in Scotland were doing this daily in the late 19th century, and probably much earlier too, because Alexander Carmichael collected their Gaelic prayers and poems in a book called the Carmina Gadelica, which “abounds with prayers invoking God’s blessing on such routine daily tasks as lighting the fire, milking the cow and preparing for bed.” More recently a number of book have been written which provide contemporary prayers and blessings for all aspects of everyday life; everything from computers, exams, parties, pets, cars, meetings, lunchtimes, days off to all sorts of life situations including leaving school, divorce, redundancy and mid-life crises.
Bishop Martin Wallace has said that:
“Just as God walked with Adam in the garden of Eden, so he now walks with us in the streets of the city chatting about the events of the day and the images we see” (City Prayers, The Canterbury Press, 1994).
As a result, he wants to encourage us to “chat with God in the city, bouncing ideas together with him, between the truths of the Bible and the truths of urban life” and, “as you walk down your street, wait for the lift, or fumble for change at the cash-till … to construct your own prayers of urban imagery.”
When we do this we are tuned in to God as Samuel learnt to be and what was said of Samuel may also be said of us: “As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him … [and] continued to reveal himself … to Samuel.”
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