30 May To know and obey His voice
From the thundering descriptions of God’s voice sounding from Sinai to the subtlety of His still, small voice recorded elsewhere, nothing is more important than to know and obey His voice.
And a great and mighty wind tore into the mountains and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a still, small voice. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Suddenly a voice came to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”—I Kings 19:11-13
Clenching his jaw, tension in his stomach, our son Matt gunned his accelerator, pulling hard into the middle lane to pass the beat-up Chevy laboring up the hill on his right. His windows down, the air roaring in his ears at eighty miles an hour, and his music blaring, our teenage son had no inkling of what was about to happen.
A sudden stillness engulfed him with a silence in which every distraction ceased. Out of that surreal quiet a clear, calm command shot through his thoughts, “Matt, get out of the middle lane.”
It was almost midnight, and he was not going to make curfew. Every minute counted. Countless times we had told him to never crest that hill in the middle lane, but the Chevy on his right was crawling. Calculating mere seconds until the green light would change at the top of the hill, Matt gunned his accelerator to clear the Chevy and make it through the intersection.
The thought came again—more urgently—“Get out of the middle lane, NOW.” With an expletive of frustration, our son obeyed, reluctantly braking to pull behind the Chevy who would make him even later now.
Cresting the hill, Matt’s stomach rolled, as he and the Chevy made it through the light. On the other side of the ridge a blue Honda Civic waited in the center lane with its left turn light blinking. Its driver having no idea he was sitting in a reversible lane that belonged to oncoming traffic at that hour of the night.
Years later, training as a newly commissioned Marine infantry officer, Matt’s first night-time , live-fire exercise took place, when the bullets were real and a mistake could be fatal. The young Marines were instructed how to fire at their targets down range, keeping a narrow sector of fire, keeping them from endangering fellow officers on their flanks. The young Marines were tired, but their adrenaline was pumping.
The black stillness of the early morning suddenly gave way to a barrage of gunfire as flares exploded overhead bringing the battlefield alive. Alternately firing and advancing in long grass over rolling uneven terrain, sprinting four or five steps and then diving to the ground to take cover as they fired off multiple rounds, Matt’s squad fought to keep their line of sight trained on the targets popping up ahead. The roar of deafening explosions tore the air around him. And then, suddenly, Matt was engulfed by the same surreal stillness he had experienced years before… and out of that stillness came the clear, calm, concise command, “Stop.”
On a hard sprint laden with gear, our son stopped dead in his tracks, at the precise moment a fully automatic stream of red tracer fire sliced through the space he would have occupied had he taken two more steps.
Nothing has the power to guide, guard and change our life more than to know and obey His voice.