The Patience of Ammon - Listening With The Spirit

You know what happens when I go half a day without any meaningful thing that I want to blog about? I open the scriptures.

It's not that I haven't been having any spiritual thoughts or discussions lately - I have been. But many of them seem too specifically directed toward me, while others seem to have no practical application. For example, I could tell you that the third chapter of Isaiah, while specifically written about Judah and Jerusalem, might as well have been written about us, describing how wicked people would be in the last days and in what ways they would be wicked, but while that's very interesting, what could we possibly do with that information? Perhaps I got too caught up in how the two societies paralleled each other so well, that I never bridged the gap between "Huh, that's interesting"  and "How do we apply this?"

Now I'm realizing that I could have brainstormed application ideas and called that my blog post, or I could have blogged about how we need to not only learn from the scriptures but also find ways to apply them, but I already opened the Book of Mormon, selected a random verse, and saw a perfectly bloggable message with a clear method of application, and now I kind of want to blog about that.

The verse I found was Alma 18:14

Therefore Ammon turned himself unto the king, and said unto him: What wilt thou that I should do for thee, O king? And the king answered him not for the space of an hour, according to their time, for he knew not what he should say unto him.

 There are a number of messages we could take out of this verse. It's polite to look at the people you're talking to. If you don't know what to say, it may be best to just not say anything (which doesn't apply to my blog). The descendants of Lehi probably measured time differently than we do, reminding us that time is measured differently to different people, as it certainly is for God and us, and what we do with our time is much more important than how much time we actually have.

But the message I first thought of after reading this verse was patience - specifically, the patience of Ammon in waiting for an hour(ish) to receive and answer from his king. We all are probably aware that prayer is how we talk to God and that conversations (especially meaningful conversations) tend to go both ways. Both parties take turns talking and listening to each other talk. God certainly is listening to us when we pray. The real question here is "Are we listening to Him?"

A lot of non-Christian religions, especially those that don't think of themselves as "religions," promote the concept of meditation, which is essentially and activity that consists of nothing but listening, with maybe some stretching and/or deep breathing thrown in. Some feel that they gain enlightenment through meditation, and right now, I'm not surprised. I think that people who meditate, whether they know it or not, are listening to God, so I'm not surprised at all the God, in His own way, might speak to them.

There are other ways God can speak to us, thankfully, besides touching our hearts directly. I say "thankfully" because it takes a certain amount of spiritual sensitivity to receive direct revelation, and it usually takes a good deal of time to reach that level of sensitivity, and we usually don't have that kind of time. When tend to get busy or distracted. Life's good at that. So God gives us more clear messages through prophets and apostles both ancient and modern. It's one way of getting a message across, and it's how God got across to me just now the message of the merit of listening during and after our prayers.

While scripture study and General Conference are great for giving us clear messages, they're not always as deep or as personal as the messages God wants to share with us. For example, you can hear an old man standing at an oak pulpit say "God loves you," and you might believe it, but it's another thing entirely to feel the love of God fill your heart while you pray.

Another blessing of listening to God through prayer is how frequently we're able to do it. We have General Conference every six months, we have church every seven days, and some families have scripture study every single day, so we can listen to God every day, sometimes multiple times per day, all without ever listening with the spirit. But when we listen with the spirit by connecting to God through prayer, we can talk and listen to God any time we want. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's possible to do it at all times.

As I said before, it takes sensitivity, and it's easy to get distracted. I struggle with that sometimes, as do we all, I think. But when God has something to say to us, and we take the time to listen, then we learn the true meaning of inspiration, and it is a beautiful thing.