Learning to Listen: What Samuel's Story Teaches Us About Hearing God
Most of us assume that some people are just naturally better at hearing from God. But what if the problem isn't our spiritual frequency? What if the real issue is that we've never learned how to truly listen?
Hearing and Listening Are Not the Same Thing
Evelyn Glennie is one of the world's greatest percussionists. She has performed with major orchestras, won Grammy Awards, and built a career around sound. She is also profoundly deaf, having lost about 90% of her hearing by age 12.
Her teacher, Ron Forbes, didn't tell her to listen harder. Instead, he helped her pay attention differently. He asked her where she felt the vibration. In her hands? Her chest? Her legs? Over time, Evelyn learned to experience sound through her entire body. She eventually performed barefoot so she could feel vibrations moving through the floor.
Her life's mission became teaching the world to listen, because she discovered something most of us with perfectly functioning ears have never learned: hearing and listening are not the same thing.
You can hear someone speak while already forming your response. You can hear your child talk about their day while scrolling your phone. You can hear someone say "I'm fine" and miss everything underneath those words. Listening requires something more. It requires attention, availability, and curiosity.
What Does the Bible Say About Seasons of Spiritual Silence?
The story of Samuel in 1 Samuel begins with a striking line: "The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread." In other words, God seemed quiet. There was no great movement, no obvious revelation. Heaven felt strangely silent.
Many of us know exactly what that feels like. There are seasons when faith feels alive, prayer comes easily, and worship reaches something deep inside you. And then there are other seasons when you pray and only hear your own thoughts. You open your Bible and wonder what you're supposed to find there. You ask God for direction and receive what feels like silence.
Scripture is honest about this. There are seasons of clarity and seasons that feel silent. Faith has room for all of it.
Even When Things Feel Like They're Fading, the Lamp Hasn't Gone Out
Right after telling us the word of God was rare, the writer adds another detail. Eli, the old priest, was lying down and his eyesight had begun to grow dim. Everything in the story feels like it's fading. The visions. The priest's sight. The spiritual life of the people. Night has fallen.
But then comes one of the most quietly powerful lines in scripture: the lamp of God had not gone out yet.
The word was rare. The visions were few. The priest could barely see. But there was still light. Maybe not much, but just enough. And somewhere beside that dim little flame, a boy named Samuel was sleeping.
You Can Know Church Without Knowing How to Listen to God
Samuel grew up in the temple. He knew the building, the rituals, the rhythms. He slept beside the ark, the very place where God was known to reside. And yet the text says something surprising: Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of God had not yet been revealed to Him.
Proximity to religion and attentiveness to God are not the same thing. You can know church and not know how to listen. You can memorize scripture, understand theology, know all the songs and traditions, and still have to learn how to recognize the voice of love when it calls your name.
Listening can be learned. That's the point.
Why We Need Other People to Help Us Hear God
When Samuel hears a voice calling His name, He runs to Eli three times before Eli finally understands what's happening. It's the old man, the one whose eyesight was failing, who helps the young boy see anew. Eli tells him: "Go lie down, and if He calls you, say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.'"
Our culture often tells us that spirituality is a private experience. Follow your heart. Trust yourself. Find your truth. And there is wisdom in that. But the biblical story gives us something more communal. Samuel needed Eli. He needed someone who had lived longer and listened longer to say, "Something is happening here. Go back and listen again."
Sometimes we need another person to help us recognize what's stirring inside of us. A spiritual director, a therapist, a pastor, a trusted friend, or even a small group. Someone who can say, "Pay attention to that." Or someone who can say, "That voice you're hearing doesn't deserve your attention."
How Do You Know If You're Actually Hearing From God?
Not every voice inside of us is God. People have done extraordinarily beautiful things because they believed God called them to. But people have also done horrific things claiming the same. Discernment matters.
A few questions worth asking:
What kind of life does listening to this voice produce?
Does it make me more loving, more compassionate, more humble, more attentive to the suffering of my neighbors?
Does it expand my capacity to love God, neighbor, and self?
Or does it make me more afraid, more self-righteous, more convinced I'm right and everyone else is wrong?
Does it require someone else's humiliation to make me feel faithful?
God does not whisper hatred. God's voice may challenge us. It may disrupt us. It may invite us into something difficult. But the movement of God is always toward greater love, greater goodness, greater justice, and greater wholeness.
What Does God's Voice Actually Sound Like?
When Elijah desperately wanted to hear from God, scripture tells us God was not in the thunder. God was not in the fire. His voice came as a gentle whisper.
God frequently works through memory, through intuition, through scripture that keeps returning to mind, through the words of another person in conversation, through striking beauty that stops us in our tracks, through discomfort, or through a persistent sense that something deserves our attention.
But that's hard to hear when every empty space has been filled. When we wake up and check our phones, drive with the radio on, exercise with headphones in, cook with a podcast playing, and scroll the moment we have to wait in line. A life in which every empty space is immediately filled leaves very little room to listen.
Spiritual Maturity Is Not About Getting God to Turn Up the Volume
Evelyn Glennie's teacher didn't teach her to listen by giving her more volume. He turned things down. He taught her to become more sensitive.
Spiritual maturity works the same way. It's not about getting God to speak louder. It's about becoming sensitive enough to notice the vibration of love moving through the world and joining it.
Samuel's prayer, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening," is a prayer of receptivity. It's the opposite of most of our prayers, which tend to sound more like: "Listen, God, your servant is speaking. Here's my list. Here's the problem. Here's what you should probably do about it."
There is nothing wrong with bringing all of that to God in prayer. But relationships cannot only be about speaking. At some point, we have to become available.
