Hearing Footsteps

"We often miss hearing God's voice simply because we aren't paying attention."—Rick Warren

It would have been easier to complain about the snow after being teased with a bit of an open winter. Instead, resolve kicked in, snowshoes were kicked on, and it was on to Mission Possible: If You Can’t Beat It, Enjoy It. The decision, as is almost always the case, did not disappoint. Hiking through the woods, no matter what the season, has a way of arousing and awakening nearly ever sense within you:

Seeing beauty in the details of a beautiful big picture.

Feeling leg muscles begin to burn with a beautiful kind of hurt.

Tasting gallons of fresh air rush into your lungs with beautiful cleansing.

Smelling evergreens warmed by the sun and beautiful stubborn earth emerging by brooks.

And on this particular day, acutely aware of the sound of every creaking pine, every distant bird call, every twig breaking under foot, every beautiful note being sung by a stream that refuses to let winter win.

"Ears to hear and eyes to see—

    both are gifts from the Lord."—Proverbs 20:12, NLT

It wasn’t that way earlier in the week when I awoke “on the wrong side of the bed” to an ear that was plugged up…and wouldn’t unplug, no matter how I tried. Hoping it would just take care of itself and go away, a few hours became the next 24 hours, and though I could hear perfectly well out of the other ear, everything was half out of order. What I wanted to hear, muffled. What I thought I was hearing, wrong. Impossible to hear a whisper. Suddenly, a sense of feeling adrift without a compass while everyone around me seemed to know exactly what to say and where to go next.

In the walk-in clinic, after what seemed like a half-hour power wash of my ear canal, out came what the nurse said was impacted blockage about the size of an almond. (I may never eat almonds again.) How was that possible?

“Pretty evident that it built up over time until there was no place for it to go. Happens to a lot of people.”

“But what can I do so that it doesn’t happen again?”

“It’s something you’ll probably have to fight off the rest of your life. The important thing is to clean it out at the first sign of trouble. Don’t let it go and hope for the best.”

When we wake up "on the wrong side of the bed," our natural I-can-handle-this tendency can be to let it go and hope for the best. That works sometimes. But mostly, we walk every day through a world filled with dirt and dust and junk that is determined to distract us from the straight and narrow Good Path. And neglect becomes deafening.

That visit to the clinic, and that hike in the beautiful woods, were reminders to purpose to make every day count, to take no day and nothing for granted. 

To live in such a way, as the psalmist put it:  “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12, NIV).

To live in such a way, even in March, that hearing—especially hearing God’s footsteps along each leg of the journey—may become the greatest, most precious sense awareness of them all….

“Resolve to be aware of what God is doing…tune our ear heavenward, and determine that this season will not slip away, that we might have our eyes wide open to see that the LORD is present and active.”—From “40 Days of Revival,” Hillsong