He Wakes The Ear First

Camille had been waking at four twenty for eleven days and she was extremely annoyed about it.

Not four. Not half four. Four twenty, give or take a couple of minutes, with her eyes open and her mind already clear, which is the particular insult of it. If she had woken up muzzy she could have gone back off. She was awake awake, in a dark room, with three and a half hours before she had to be anywhere.

She had done all the sensible things. She had cut the coffee off at two. She had put the phone across the room. She had gone to bed earlier and then later. On the eighth night she lay there and looked at the ceiling and did a fairly thorough inventory of everything wrong in her life, which is what four twenty in the morning is for.

Her friend Delphine, who is a nurse and unromantic about most things, asked her about it over the counter at work.

Camille said she was not sleeping.

And Delphine said, in the flat way she says everything: "You're sleeping. You're just waking up. Those are different."

Camille said what is the difference.

Delphine said: "You're not lying there trying to get to sleep. You said you're wide awake. That's not insomnia. Something's waking you."

She said it in the register of a woman diagnosing a mattress problem. She meant no more by it than she said. And Camille went home and lay down that night and woke at four eighteen and lay there in the dark with a completely different question in her head, which was: woken by what?

She has no dramatic answer. She wants that said clearly. Nothing spoke to her. There was no voice and there was no experience.

What there was, on the twelfth morning, was Camille lying in the dark deciding, on more or less no evidence, to treat being awake as being called instead of as being failed by her own body. And she said, out loud, into an empty room, "All right. I'm listening."

She said it felt ridiculous. She said she has done it most mornings since and it has stopped feeling ridiculous and she cannot tell you when that happened.

You have probably been treating something similar as a fault. The early waking, the thought that will not go, the pull toward something you keep dismissing as your own restlessness. And the possibility nobody has put in front of you is that being awake and being woken are two different things, and that you have been assuming the first move in all of this was supposed to be yours.

The Ear Gets Wakened Before The Tongue Says Anything

There is a line in Isaiah about mornings that puts the whole order of this the other way round from how most people carry it.

"The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned."Isaiah 50:4

Read the verbs and who is doing them. He wakeneth. Twice. Morning by morning, He wakens, and what He wakens is the ear.

Not the mouth. The ear.

The whole picture in that verse is of somebody who ends up with something worth saying to a weary person, and the sequence that produces it starts with being woken and listening, not with getting up and performing.

You have been woken rather than simply awake, and that is a different sentence about the same four twenty in the morning. Isaiah 50 puts the waking on God's side and puts the listening before the speaking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient servant song and lands it in a dark bedroom in a modern flat.

And that is the shape of the first through the whole of Scripture. The first is not the thing you produce to begin the relationship. It is the thing that arrives before yours does, so that everything you do afterwards is a response and not an initiative.

You were reached for before you reached, on every one of those eleven mornings you spent annoyed about it. That is what the written word says about how any of this ever starts, and it is the Spirit of God who turns that from a doctrine into the reason a woman says something out loud into a dark room.

Listening Is Not A Skill You Are Behind On

Now the part that has to be said plainly, because the word listening has been ruined for a lot of people.

It has been made into a technique. There are people who will tell you they hear things constantly and people who will tell you they never have and a great many people in the middle who have quietly concluded they are bad at it, and that whole conversation has produced far more anxiety than it has produced hearing.

Isaiah does not describe a skill. He describes a man being woken and having his ear opened by Somebody else, morning by morning, which is the language of a supply and not of an aptitude.

Camille did not learn to listen. She said one sentence in the dark. That is not a technique and it is not an achievement, and it works exactly as well for a person who has never once had a spiritual experience in their life.

You have not been failing at hearing God. It is written that the sheep know His voice, which is a statement about the shepherd's clarity and not about the sheep's expertise, and His Spirit is the one who is already the reason you have been awake and wondering.

And here is the guard, because this is exactly where a light thing becomes heavy. Nothing on this page is a requirement. There is no method, no words that have to be right, no minimum, no expectation of an answer, and nothing routed to anybody. If you say it and nothing at all happens, which is likely and normal, you are exactly as much His lying there in the dark, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from turning into a performance review.