I watched a young mum interacting with her deaf child
recently. The child wore a hearing aid, but that wasn’t what I noticed. I
noticed the mum’s hands discreetly signing the conversation. The girl often
responded without looking at her mother’s hands, but not always. There were
some things she apparently only heard by watching the sign language.
We all hear God in different ways. Most of us hear him in a
variety of ways. We hear his voice through our friends, be they believers or
not, and also through strangers. We hear him speak to us through media
channels, through nature, and through circumstances. We hear him as we read the
Bible attentively and prayerfully.
We also hear him as we sit with others in silence asking him
to speak to us. I recently had the privilege of sitting with three others, two
of them teenagers, in prayerful silence. We’d asked God to enlighten us on a
couple of things. Within a couple of minutes everyone had received a prayer
picture and though they seemed different, together they made sense and gave an
answer.
I think of Elijah and the priests of Baal. The pagan priests
entreated their god to send fire onto their altar. They danced wildly and cut
themselves and did everything they could think of for a long time but still
there was no response. When it was Elijah’s turn in this rather weird contest,
he soaked his altar first and then just asked God to send down fire onto the
altar. Instant answer. Impressive.
Ours is an impressive God who longs to communicate with us
and go deeper in relationship. All we need is a bit of time, an open heart, a
willing spirit, and faith to believe that what we hear or see is really from
the Almighty Creator God.
That's an advantage of corporate prayer, as God amazes us by giving each person a bit of the jigsaw which makes sense when seen as a whole.
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