Loud and Clear

Lately I feel I may have overdone it.

I am so overloaded with alerts, updates, news, tips, offers and just plain spam, that I have had to spend a good portion of my time tracking down ways to unsubscribe.

It is not easy.  Once they have gotten hold of you, they are not too willing to let go.

The next day we left and came to Caesarea; and we went into the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the seven, and stayed with him.  He had four unmarried daughters who had the gift of prophecy. While we were staying there for several days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea.  - Acts 21:8-10

In today's reading from Acts, Paul is bombarded by messengers.  An evangelist, his four daughters and a visiting prophet all try to convince him that he should not go to Jerusalem.

Do you think God is trying to tell him something?

He should be getting the message loud and clear, but for some reason he feels he has to ignore them all.

When the message is something we don't care to hear, the more people try to tell us, the more stubborn and turned off by it we might become.  The desired effect, getting it to sink in and enlighten us, results in the opposite.  We unsubscribe.

We all run the risk of being turned off, shut down, ignored.  It is hard, though, to address the feedback if all we are doing is talking and not listening.

That is one of the issues with modern communication technology.  It is all broadcast and very little real communication.  We are either receivers or transmitters most of the time and that means we have no idea who is really hearing what.

If we look at how much we pay attention to in our daily lives, we may get a hint.  Nobody is paying attention.  We have all become skimmers and flash readers, grabbing the headlines rather than reading the content, and few may be doing what I do, taking the time to go through all the chatter and filter out what I no longer want.

Most of us like to think we are being heard.  We count the followers on Facebook and Twitter, and we are proud of the number of connections we have.  Who cares!

We are the only ones keeping score.  Everyone else is too busy tracking their own popularity.

So, what's the point?  Why bother?

Well, I think we have to go back and look at Paul for a glimpse at the message of messaging.  God didn't rely on only one voice.

All throughout The Bible, God keeps sending messengers to his people.  They are successful for a while and them people unsubscribe.  They turn off, and even kill the messengers.

So God sends another and another and another.

We Christians believe he finally sent his son to be a special and final messenger.  But God uses all channels at all times.  He has a way of getting us to help Him do the work He wants done, if we tune in.

So, in this clutter of messages and this cacophony of voices, there may be something worth hearing, and that means those of us who receive will eventually hear something important, even if the source is obscure or totally wacky.

That's what I think, anyway.

Thanks for listening.

More to come...


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