Whispers and Shouts

What gets your attention more: whispers or shouts? We have a beloved Yorkie which is why I chose this banner photo of this breed of dog standing at full attention to whatever He is hearing! (Isn’t he cute??)

Of course, a shout can be heard better, but often it’s a whisper that gets our attention, draws us in. We have to lean in to hear a whisper while, often, shouting makes us want to back away from the shout-er!

Recently we took our 10 year old Yorkie Mo (lovingly knowing as #MoDawg on social media!) on our first real walk of the season. He went blind in the last year and, although he still loved his walks after that, we weren’t sure how free he would feel to run without his leash with his eyesight almost completely gone now. In fact, last year after he ran pell mell straight into a creek a couple of times, and a lake once, we realized something was wrong with his eyes. We were so excited last week to see he still loves to run!

We did notice, though, that he’s much quicker to follow our commands to “come back”, “stop” and “slow down” than he used to be! He now has to rely on our voices to help him navigate where he is and where safety is. We don’t have to shout or call as many times as we did when he had great eyesight

How does God get your attention? Often it will be very obvious as though He is shouting at us!

Then there are other times it seems He is silent or barely whispering.

But remember what happens when someone whispers? Look at the little girl in the photo above. We lean in so we can hear better. WOW! What a picture of how God often wants to get our attention. He wants us to follow His voice of Truth, just as MoDawg has learned to depend on us for visual direction.

Perhaps, like me, you are frustrated when you think He’s not speaking. But I believe He’s always speaking through others, through His Word, through His creation, and a million other ways. Often,I just am not listening. Sometimes He has me in a waiting season, wanting me to reach out to Him, listen more carefully to Him. Kind of like Elijah in 1 Kings 19 as the name of the Lord was proclaimed in the whisper, in the wilderness, after he was God’s instrument of a miracle at Mount Carmel, then ran for his life from Jezebel.

I finished a book recently about God’s whispers and shared a second post on this topic. You can read How Does God Whisper to You here.

Banner photo by Piotr Stefański on Unsplash