I timidly picked up the ringing phone. “ Who could be calling me in the dead of night?” I asked myself, somewhat worried. “Are you there?” the voice asked. Before I could answer, “Yes”, the line went busy. I could sense the urgency in that voice. It was fraught with fear and my mind suddenly became cluttered with harrowing images of the possible situations that that person might be in at that moment. I made a return call, dialling with frantic, trembling fingers. To my dismay, the recorded voice, as if to add more pressure to the burden at hand, answered, “The number you dialled cannot be reached.” Cannot be reached! Of all times!! “But this is an emergency!” I replied almost at the top of my voice, momentarily forgetting that it was an answering machine I was talking to.
Have you been into this kind of emergency situation where you badly needed someone to talk with but you failed to contact the person because “the number you dialled cannot be reached”? Frustration to the nth level, indeed! It is worse than “looking for your eyeglasses without your eyeglasses”.
If only I could reach out to the heavens…! The thought brought a jolt into my senses. Compunction assailed me. I checked myself. Who cannot be reached actually?
Oftentimes, when God calls, we are the ones who cannot be reached. Where are we when we sense God is calling us to pray? To give? To minister to people? Where are we in moments when God calls us to answer a need? To read His Word? To dispense compassion? Where are we? Has God reached us? And have we eagerly responded to His call?
But how does God deal with our calls? The Book of Psalms i Chapter 18:6 succinctly declares, “ In my distress I called to the Lord; I cried to my God for help. From His temple he heard my voice; my cry came before Him, into His ears.”
God has no secretary to take our call. He has no answering machine to tell us He cannot be reached.
Our call, He hears! Our cry goes directly into His ears. He listens. He acts. Simply because He loves.
May we do the same when He speaks to us.