Listening...

A life lived listening to the decisive call of God is a life lived before one audience that trumps all others - the Audience of One. - Os Guinness

Listening.

Reflecting.

Two of the most important lifeskills I have had to learn much about. Why?

Because they act as the tracks on which a train chugs forward to where it is to go.

As in, life as a train.

I cannot fathom how to hold on to God's 'decisive call' if I cannot recall a single decisive moment in which God had taken hold of my heart, and fully. Woe, if that is true.

I cannot imagine the overwhelming sense of bewilderment I should experience if I had never listened to the orchestra that has played since as far back as I can remember, of different but distinct sounds taking place at varying tempos and trajectories over the years and months, highs and lows, but all for one symphony. It's like a note that was played last week merging with a note strummed last decade, both to find harmony with a 3rd note that is to be plucked 5 years from now. Sounds that reverberate, transcendent in time and space. If your life was one song, your days are pages of its eternal, hyperlinked, virtual score, to be completed one note at a time but not in neatly sequenced lines in time. Can you picture it???

And if you picture yourself walking through a desert trail, your insides screaming for hydration - any kind! Cast a look behind you and see all that which appear randomly strewn across the landscape of your past like pebbles on the desert ground, no conceivable pattern to the human eye but from the eagle's perch, ahh... a formation of beauty - a life well lived. If I suffer no thirst for oasis, would I stop and look around me - reflect, listen?

Backdrops to a theatre play change like scenes in a modern-day Korean drama. One minute blissful and jovial, the next ominous and sinister. Twists in the plot too dark, you say? Oh, but is it not that for which you paid? Shall we not say performance is part of life, if life is to be lived as to an audience (even) of One? Forget auditions. Forget safety nets. Forget fake knives and cushioned plunges. Forget blank bullets, artificial airguns and packed ketchup-pellets. The real thing takes real risk. When you watch something that deeply moves you, moves you to your very core, would you break the spell with words so deficient you would rather not speak too soon? Suspense. Shh! Don't talk now, pay attention to the heroine.

Do you not hear the breathing of the One sitting, engaging, watching in the shadows of His seat? You can't see his face, but you KNOW he's there. Sometimes from where you stand, you sense his movement, even the thickness of his emotions. 

Are you listening for shouts you want to hear, applauds maybe? Bravo! Encore! Fantastique!

Yet...silence. 

Was it good?

Hear a pin drop.

Did he like it?

Curtain!

Will he stand to his feet, and break the deafening silence with his claps of joy and a smile that says it all?

"No one could've played that role any better than you!"

"Oh, you were magnificent."

"Absolutely captivating performance."

"I don't think anybody can top that!"

Really? *smile*

All that was JUST for you, my Lord.

The only One who came to my show.

Not meant to be replayed or recorded.

I performed my best, flaws included.

Oh, your smile at the finale speaks louder than words in between!!!

It was all worth it, my audience of One.