Selective Hearing

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” – Proverbs 3:5

Yesterday, Ash Wednesday marked the beginning of the Lenten season of forty days leading to Easter. My daughters attended a church service with me last night while my husband played in the praise band.

The service was advertised as a “family” service, which to me meant it would be geared toward kids with a message the younger crowd could appreciate. Imagine my surprise when the sermon was about David’s adulterous encounter with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband. I never would have guessed that church would be where my children learned the word “affair.” I also didn’t think it would be the place where they would find out babies don’t always come after marriage, the way I have implied. When we got to the car, I asked my kids what they thought about the service. Thankfully, they both agreed that they didn’t understand a lot of it because “the guy talking used too many big words.” Whew, maybe we dodged a couple of bullets there.

However, despite her lack of understanding some vocabulary, the Lord still used that service to work a transformation in my eight-year-old’s heart. The whole way home she happily chattered on about how she had gotten out of the habit of reading the Bible every day and wanted to resume the discipline. She asked if we could read from the Bible before dinner each night during Lent, and if she could start getting up earlier in the morning to have time to pray or work through her devotional guide. She asked if it was okay to pray at school. She also expressed her sadness for a girl who doesn’t know Jesus, and said she wanted to tell her friend about Him at recess. Clearly, while I was worrying about what was said in the service, God was speaking to her in an entirely different way.

I love that about God. I find it fascinating that He can lead two people in the same worship service to hear two entirely different things. My oldest daughter left the service on fire, I left trying to figure out how I would explain some of the speaker’s more colorful descriptions of David’s behavior, and my youngest left wondering how long it would be before she could get home and into bed. She also wanted to know why everyone had ashes on their foreheads. The same experience left us in different emotional states and fueled unique responses in how to move forward in faith.

This experience has me feeling a bit more confident in sending my daughter out into the world at large. While I believe it is important to let kids enjoy the innocence of youth and to shield young children from some of the harsher realities of life, I can now see that I am not alone in this effort. God is obviously at work in filling her ears with what He has to say, protecting her from things she doesn’t need to hear. That doesn’t mean she is oblivious to the four-letter words that float around the third grade, or the way her peers all giggle at the word “sex,” but I trust that God can temper her understanding of these things until she is developmentally ready for them.

Have you ever had an experience where someone at church gave your child more information than you hoped? What was the result of this?

Faith in Those Around Us

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

Have you ever wondered what it was like to be Noah’s wife? She didn’t receive a message from God, yet her life was turned upside down by her husband’s mission to build the ark. She directly felt the impact of the long hours Noah spent building the ship. She got by with less when her husband used their resources for his project. She faced the ridicule of their friends and neighbors who didn’t understand why someone would build an enormous boat miles from any body of water. The Bible never tells us that God gave Noah’s wife any first-hand information. She had no choice but to trust her husband.

How do we respond to the calling of those around us? Had I been Noah’s wife, he would have endured a peppering of endless questions. God told you to do what? Are you sure it was God? How do you know? Are you sure this is what He told you? How do you know? Are you sure you are supposed to do this right now? How do you know?

My church is facing a situation where the elders have each received the same message from God (all nine of them), and the rest of the congregation is asking the questions. This is a dilemma we come across often in life. At what point do we trust another person to have accurately heard, interpreted, and understood a message from God, and when do we question? When God speaks to someone close to us, but leaves us in the dark, how do we respond?

I foresee having a hard time with this when my children get older and start telling me about their own callings. Will I trust that they have listened well to God and keep my hands to myself and my mouth shut as He uses them?

When God’s plans are directed at those around us and we struggle with knowing how to respond, the only thing we really can do is to pray. We can ask God to help us know how to react, how to participate, or to understand if any action is even necessary. When praying about our church situation earlier this week, God told me to hold the course. “You are right where I want you,” He said. “This is not a time I want you getting involved or rocking the boat.” Sometimes we have to be content in simply doing nothing more than having the faith to trust someone else.

Who is God calling you to trust today? What can you do to teach your children how to discern between trustworthy people and those who aren’t honest?