Can We Really Hear From God?

Be still, and know that I am God. Psalm 46: 10

A friend of mine who leads spiritual retreats once told me that not one person who has followed his regimen of a silent retreat has failed to hear from God. Intrigued and a bit skeptical, I signed up for a 5-day retreat. We had much free time and just a few requirements, such as the assignment to spend 2 hours praying each day.

I doubt I had devoted more than 30 minutes to prayer at any one session in my life. The first day I wandered to a meadow and sat against a tree. How long will I stay awake? I wandered. To my great fortune, a herd of 147 elk in their natural habitat is enthralling and, eventually, boring. Yet after a while the very placidity of the scene began to affect me. Over the next few days I said many words to God. I was turning 50, and I asked for guidance on how I should prepare my soul for the rest of life. Many things came to mind while sitting in a field for hours at a time. I had to agree that I had indeed heard from God.

When Elijah stood before the Lord on Mount Horeb, he didn't meet Him in the wind, earthquake, or fire. Rather, God spoke in a "still small voice" (I Kings 19:11-12).

I'm more convinced than ever that God finds ways to communicate to those who truly seek Him--especially when we lower the volume of the surrounding static. ...Philip Yancey

Speak, Lord in the stillness, while I wait on Thee;
Hushed my heart to listen, in expectancy. .... Grimes

God speaks to those who are quiet before Him.

က်မခုတေလာ၊ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံမွာ ဒုကၡေရာက္ေနေသာ ေသြးခ်င္းညီေနာင္မ်ား ကို သတိယတယ္၊ သူတို႕ ကိုကူညီမဲ့သူေတြေရာက္လာပါေစ။ ဘယ္ကဘဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ဆိုျပီး ဆုေတာင္းတယ္။ တခ်ိန္တည္းမွာဘဲ ဘုရားက ဘာေၾကာင့္ နုတ္ဆိတ္ေနရတာလည္း ဆိုတာကိုစဥ္းစားမရ၊ ေဒါသေတြထြက္၊ ဟိုသတင္းဖတ္လည္းဒါ၊ ဒီသတင္းဖတ္လည္းဒါ၊ ဟိုလူ႕ ဘေလာဂ့္ဖတ္ ဒီအေၾကာင္း၊ ဒီလူ႕ ဘေလာဂ့္ဖတ္ ဒီအေၾကာင္းဘဲ ျဖစ္ေနေတာ့၊ မလည္ေတာ့ဘူး၊ သတင္းလည္း မဖတ္ေတာ့ဘူး၊ ဘုရားနဲ႕က်မ၂ ဦးတည္း ဆုေတာင္းတယ္၊ တိုင္တည္တယ္။
မေန႕က ျမန္မာျပည္မွာရွိေနတဲ့ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြနဲ႕ ေျပာေတာ့၊ သူတို႕လူငယ္ေတြက ကူညီဖို႕ သြားၾကတယ္တဲ့၊ နိုင္ငံေတာ္ အစိုးရ လစ္လွ်ဴ ရႈထားတဲ့ ရြာေတြ အမ်ားၾကီးတဲ့၊ သူတို႕လည္း ဟိုပတ္ဒီေရွာင္နဲ႕ သြားရေတာ့၊ အလွဴ ပစၥည္းက မ်ားမ်ား မသယ္နိုင္ဘူးေလ၊ ဆန္ေတြေပးေတာ့၊ ကုန္မွာစိုးလို႕၊ ငရုပ္ဆံုေလးမွာေထာင္း၊ ဆန္ျပဳတ္ဘဲခ်က္စားတယ္တဲ့။
ရြာလံုးကၽြတ္၊ (လူဦးေရ ၁၅၀၀ ေလာက္ရွိေသာ )ဆံုးသြားတာကို၊ စရင္းက ၅၀၀ ဘဲေရးထားၾကတယ္တဲ့၊ တရြာကေတာ့ အေမေရာ၊ အေဖေရာ၊ သားခ်င္းေတြပါဆံုးသြားတဲ့ ၂လ သားအရြယ္ ကေလးတေယာက္က သစ္ပင္ဆံုခြမွာ အသက္ရွင္က်န္ခဲ့တယ္တဲ့ေလ။
ကူညီမယ္လို႕ေျပာတာကို လက္မခံေပမဲ့ ဘုရားက လူတခ်ိဳ႕ကိုလႊတ္ေပးေနပါလားလို႕ အမွတ္ယ၊ ေက်းဇူးတင္မိတယ္၊ ဘုရားက က်မကို စိတ္မပူဖို႕ေျပာေနတယ္ေလ။
ျငိမ္ဝမ္လ်က္ ေနၾကေလာ့၊ ငါကားဘုရားသခင္ျဖစ္သည္ဟု သိမွတ္ၾကေလာ့၊ ဆာလံက်မ္း ၄၆း ၁၀.