Speak, Lord, Your Servant Is Listening

In today’s first  reading, 1 Samuel 3: 1-10, 19-20, young Samuel is asleep when he hears his name being called.  He goes to Eli, his superior and mentor, thinking Eli called him. He does this three times.  Eli then realizes that it is the Lord who is calling Samuel and instructs him to go back to sleep and if he hears his name called again that he should answer: “Speak , Lord, your servant is listening.”  Until that point, Samuel “was not familiar with the Lord, because the Lord had not revealed anything to him as yet.”  Note the statement “as yet.”  You may not, yet, be familiar with the Lord.  However you will be, that is part of our call as baptized Christians to get to know the Lord and His ways, to put on His thoughts, to recognize His will and follow it.  “I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her” (Hosea 2:14). Sometimes, as we say in the addiction’s field, people have to hit rock bottom before they cry out: “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”   Somehow we need to experience the absolute emptiness of the promises of this world and in that desert come to realize that it is the Lord whom we  seek, and need, that it is His voice for which we need to be listening. Out of our sleep, the Lord calls us to be His instrument in a world darkened by sin, led astray by ego-demands to accumulate material things and to climb the corporate ladder of success while neglecting those of the Spirit. 

Am I ready to be awakened? Do I have a wisdom figure, a spiritual director,  like Eli whom I trust, who encourages me to listen for the Lord’s voice amid the darkness of night?