MISSED ANY CALLS LATELY?

You must have realised how irritating it is to find out that someone has been phoning you and you missed the call and didn't realise that you were being called. Especially if it was someone you particularly wanted to speak to. Missed calls are part of our modern life. In the not so distant past we were not so lucky to have the phone register the fact that someone was calling us...and so we were ignorant of who really wished us well or had something important to tell us.

Today one easily thinks "what would we do without the mobile phone?" and to some extent its use has become more of an intransigence in our life than a help. Yet the mobile phone actually goes back quite a long way. Indeed, I found out recently that the immediate precursor of the modern phone could be considered to be the radio telephone developed for battlefield communications during the Second World War though the concept had to wait until the Sixties before serious development began and which shot off in the Seventies.... and the rest, as they say, is history.

The fact that today we are able to be called wherever we may be in the world is, nonetheless, something that should make us think. Our lives are equally full of missed calls of a different nature, mostly from the One that Matters, the I Am Who Am, Yahweh. Call Him what you wish...probably God is by far the easiest title. But have you ever imagined what it might be like to have our mobile phone registering all His attempts to get in touch with us every day? And that is leaving His e-mails and other communications out of the equation.  



The other day a friend told me she had to start a new e-mail address since the one she had was already choc-a-block and she needed another e-mail address simply for friend communications, as she put it. Imagine if she had to deal with God's messaging too!   I even wonder if the whole of the internet would suffice to contain all His e-mails to us which go unanswered?

The Cherokee rite of passage

I think we generally tend to take Him for granted, as if the Almighty Good isn't there. It reminds me of a story I once heard about the Cherokee Legend, the story of a typical Cherokee Indian youth's rite of passage. It appears that the father takes the boy into the forest, blindfolds him and leaves him alone. He is required to sit on a stump the whole night and not remove the blindfold until the rays of the morning sun shine through it. He cannot cry out for help to anyone either.

Once he survives the night, he is a MAN. He cannot tell the other boys of this experience, because each lad must come into manhood on his own.

The boy is naturally terrified. He can hear all kinds of noises. Wild beasts must surely be all around him . Maybe even some human might be lurking to harm him. The wind blew the grass and earth, and shook his stump, but he sat stoically, never removing the blindfold. It would be the only way he could become a man!

Finally, after a horrific night the sun appeared and he removed his blindfold.

It was then that he discovered his father sitting on the stump next to him. He had been at watch the entire night, protecting his son from harm.

We, too, are never alone in our lives. Even when we don't know it, God is watching over us, Sitting on the stump beside us. When trouble comes, all we have to do is reach out to Him. And that includes every sort of trouble, at home, at work, at play.

Moral of the story:    Just because you can't see God, it doesn't mean He is not there. It doesn't mean He's not looking after us or that He's not trying to communicate with us. "For we walk by faith, not by sight" says the prophet.   

Which all brings us back to where we started.....have we missed any important calls lately? It's already the time leading to Christmas, the preparation time for us on a spiritual level too. Listen to the words of the Prophet "take off your robe of mourning and misery, put on the splendour of glory from God forever; wrapped in the cloak of justice from God, bear on your head the mitre that displays the glory of the eternal name". (Baruch 5, 1-2)  Let's make sure we don't miss any calls from Him!