The Q-tip Syndrome

In yesterday’s post, I talked about following Jesus instead of asking Him to follow you. I have always wanted to follow Him, but sometimes in my life I have trouble hearing what God is trying to tell me. I have trouble understanding which direction that He wants to lead. Sometimes I feel like He is just not talking to me.

I have since learned that whenever I have these feelings that God is not communicating with me that it is not Him who has the problem. Surprise, surprise (I love Gomer Pyle) the problem always lies with me. It is not that God is not communicating with me, it is that I am not listening.

I know that if I were to interview God for this blog and ask Him, “what is one of my biggest weaknesses” His answer would be, “Sele, you are stubborn, you don’t listen, you have got to pay attention.” Ok, I’ll admit, I’m sure there are plenty of other things that God could expose about me here but stubbornness would be close to the top. Sometimes I just get so wrapped up in my own way of thinking that I don’t bother to listen to what He is telling me.

Fortunately for me, God is a great communicator, even if I’m not a very good listener. You see, if He can’t get my attention in one way He will just keep right on trying. He knows that eventually I will open my eyes and see what it is that He is trying to communicate with me.

Sometimes we just need to get our heads up out of the sand and pay attention. This past week I feel like God has been speaking to me through several of the different writers and blogs that I read on a daily basis. I always get a blessing from reading these talented individuals but this past week it was different. It seemed like every day when I was having problems, I would read something that someone had written that day and it would remind me that God was in control. All I needed to do was let Him do His thing and trust in Him.

There were several times that I felt like God was talking directly to me through these writers. But there was one specific instance that really got my attention.

One of the regular blogs that I read is by Sammy Adebiyi. All last week he wrote a series discussing the Holy Spirit. But it was his post last Friday that really got my attention. In his post he wrote the following:

The Holy Spirit is the ‘Super’ in our natural.

Get it?

You=Natural (always).

Holy Spirit=Super (always).

You + Holy Spirit= Super-natural (always). (You can read the entire post here.)

I really liked the way he put this so I wrote the following comment on his blog.

Thanks for this post. We all tend to forget the awesomeness of the Holy Spirit and tend to think we are just cruising along by ourselves. I really needed to read this today.

A few hours later I received an email that there was a follow-up response to my comment. I figured that Sammy had responded (which he did later) but this email said the following:

Julia B. has responded to your comment: Amen to that, personally its really easy to remember that, umm, yeah I’ve got NOTHING under control!!

That might not seem like such a big deal, but since the “Julia B.” that I know, is my mother-in-law who is currently lying in a hospital bed, this response from “Julia B.” was like God reaching down and bopping me on the head. He was shaking the dust and cobwebs out of my brain and telling me, “Trust Me.”

I remember from my youth my mother and father always telling me, “boy you must have wax in your ears.” This was because I didn’t listen and I was usually too busy talking. Well it seems in the past week that God has been telling me to go get a Q-tip and clean the wax out of my ears because I wasn’t paying attention to what He was trying to tell me.

So I have cleaned my ears and stopped talking long enough to hear what it is that He has to say. After all, He is communicating with me (and you) each and every day, I’m usually just not listening.

So the next time that you have trouble hearing what God is trying to tell you, you might want to go get a Q-tip and clean the wax out of your ears. And you might just want to look around you, God is communicating with us each day.

Do you need to clean the wax out of your ears?

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