Playing Chess in the Shower
“But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.” – James 1:22
God often uses situations from everyday life to teach us more about Himself. The college I attended had a rule that all freshmen received the grand prize of calling a dormitory “home”. The community established by living in close proximity to several other students proved beneficial more often than not. But there was this one recurring instance that made dorm life a challenge. Every time someone flushed a toilet, a surge of hot water ran through the shower line. For this reason, if you happened to walk down the hallway, it was fairly common to hear people screaming and/or swearing in the restroom. To make matters worse, once an immature freshman with too much time on his hands became knowledgeable of this, shower time became a game of chess. After experiencing repeated surprise visits from the uninvited scalding water, you were forced to develop a new bathing strategy. For most of the students, this meant creatively finding ways to sidestep the inconvenience of blazing bath water. A few of us took it to mean, “we need to learn to listen better.”
Most people use “hearing” and “listening” interchangeably, but they’re actually quite different. Hearing is the act of perceiving sound. It’s also passive and does not require much mental effort. You can have a conversation in a restaurant with an assortment of background chatter while eating a meal and audibly hear a police siren three blocks away without missing a beat. Why? Simply hearing something requires no personal investment. Listening, however, is active and demands personal investment. That’s the reason why most of us are such poor listeners: we fail to shut out the white noise and fully engage.
The principle of engagement applies when listening to God as well. You will only hear the Father speaking when your heart is fully engaged because God speaks, not audibly, but through the heart. Furthermore, an unwillingness to listen to God in one area will prevent you from being able to hear from Him in other areas. I’ve had people tell me, “I can’t hear from God!” or “I don’t think I’ve ever heard God talk to me!”. In most of those cases, a consistent theme I found was either an unresolved sin issue or there were things they already knew God wanted them to respond to, but they had chosen not to. The sooner we do whatever it is the Lord tells us to do, the more quickly He reveals the next step. He’s a God of order, so He will not put the cart before the horse. If you’re honoring Christ by listening as part of your regular fellowship with Him, He’ll speak at exactly the right time.
After a month into my freshman year, I figured out how to avoid the shower’s barrage of boiling H2O. Whenever a toilet flushed, you had approximately three to five seconds before the surge actually hit the shower line. So by recognizing the flushing sound AND actively engaging by shutting out the white noise (usually my own singing), I avoided the hot water checkmate. We’d be wise to listen and not just hear, for the LORD has worthy things to say.
“To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well.” – John Marshall, former United States Chief Justice
Edifying, Encouraging & Enlightening,
Excelsius
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