I finished the first of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Magician’s Nephew, for the second time just this morning. Once again, the picture of Uncle Andrew stood out boldly to me. To make a long story short and spare the details, upon finding Narnia, Uncle Andrew, who was the magician in this story, and the others all heard the voice of Aslan singing life into the barren land and thus creating Narnia. “Then, when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a lion (“only a lion,” as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing–only roaring as any lion might in a zoo in our own world.” Uncle Andrew refused to allow himself to hear the voice of Aslan.
Then, later in the book, as the plot is coming to a close, Polly, another little girl who was in the group that discovered Narnia, asked Aslan to say something to Uncle Andrew that would cause him to not return to Narnia and do the evil things within his heart. Aslan replied, however, “But I cannot tell that to his old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings.”
How many times in life are we much like Uncle Andrew? We are generally good, with fair intentions, but are full of selfish thoughts. We hear the voice of God, whom Aslan represents, but we refuse to listen. We write it off as our thoughts, a whisper, or we just flat our ignore it. We suppress the still small voice that is calling us to Himself so much that, when we truly need God to speak, we are deaf to his voice. It isn’t that God is not speaking. It isn’t that God doesn’t care. Perhaps we simply are not willing ourselves to listen.
Pause life for a minute. Open yourself up to hear from God. He calls to us in a still small voice, like a whisper riding on the wind. He speaks to our hearts and our minds, guiding and pushing us toward his will, love, grace, presence. If you want to hear him, ask. Seek him daily, for Jeremiah 29:13 says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”
Though I broke all the rules and I was going to blog this regardless of today being Five Minute Friday, it seems to fit with today’s word… Small. Every Friday, bloggers around the world blog for five minutes on one word and link in together.
Challenged & Changed 