Article January 1, 1990 Issue

Yielding to God or resisting Him?

When we pray to God and don't seem to get answers, maybe we aren't listening the right way.

Gloria Christena

"Dear God, tell me what I need to know!" How often we pray this way when some pressing problem seems to resist our efforts to solve it. It is a good prayer, providing, of course, that it is sincere. The genuine desire to know God's will, to conform our sense of things to His, to follow His commands, is a selfless prayer that never goes unanswered.

"But," we may say, "I don't get any answer." It might be more accurate to say, "But I don't hear any answer," for the lack of an answer doesn't lie in God's not giving it so much as in our not hearing what He is telling us. The divine message is always here, as close as breath, at the threshold of consciousness, waiting to be heard.

And why would we not hear? If the answer meant the solution to our problem, it would seem that the only intelligent thing to do is to listen and obey. But the human mind tends toward selective hearing. While it readily hears what it wants to hear, or what conforms to its wishes, wants, and preferences, it frequently resists hearing what it isn't so keen to know.

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