Communication... Can we Hear and understand?!?

During the recent accident in Kenya we had an interesting experience in communication. Most Kenyans have Cell phones, but those are at best a racket. The service is patchy, connections poor and with a few seconds of delays. Then there is also an accent problem and although we are both speaking English, it was obviously not the same English. Beside all this seemingly obvious problems there were also the information handed down from person to person with each adding his or her own flavor to it, that changed the original message. Getting any information to start with was hard enough and then wading through all this left you with sketchy information at best.

Looking back over this experience as a whole, I realize that we are like that in our spiritual lives as well. Not to many of us want to even engage in the process to hear from God. The distractions, bad connections and over all information system is not up to what it should be. Mostly simply because we did not take the time, resources and energy to establish a good communication system to begin with. Anyone that reckon that we can just toodle about, slap happy with no spiritual discipline and have a clear ear to hear God, obviously do not have a clue.

Then, if we even hear what is said, we do not always understand what He is saying. We do not want to go back and make sure that we understood what He meant by what He said. We run with half truths and misinformation and have to continuously adjust since we did not understood to begin with. This makes us seem wishy washy and flaky.

Then we hear information from God that is handed down from broken human to broken human, each coloring his or her own flavor into it, so that by the tail end of it, it does not even resemble the original message.
No wonder we have two hundred and eleven different doctrines around the same issue floating around in the church.

And since I am by nature a problem solver, how do we fix this? First lets work on the desire to hear Him. Having divine feedback is probably one of the most amazing wonderful things in the world. To those who do not believe that God still speaks to His people I'll be so bold as to suggest that they stop wasting their time pretending to be Christians. Without a living, communicating involved God there is no Christian.

Second; Lets work on the communication channels. Time spend in God's presence, getting to know Him and not just by petitions or in public. Every one who wants to Hear Him ought to have a private, intimate time with God. This is a discipline. Each also ought to know the scriptures, a working knowledge. We also need to experience prayers and answers to prayer, which cannot happen if you never bother to pray.

Third: Take the time, invest in it to really understand what is being said. Don't go of cocky and half-cocked. Listen and hear and learn to discern. Go back and ask again. Slow down. Take time to understand the orders before you march out.

Last: Go to the source. When another person, how well recommended or respected tell you something, check it with the source. See what the Bible says. Pray over it and see if the information is correct.

Let's end this sad frustrating communication breakdown.