In a recent blog post, I presented the first of a three part meditation on ‘the call’ of Samuel, as recorded in 1 Samuel 3. It was entitled ‘Samuel – the boy’. This is part two.
A tale of two boys and a cat
I want to start by telling you about two boys named Samuel. And a cat.
The Jewish historian Josephus believed that the biblical character, Samuel, was about 11 years old when God called him. That 11-year-old boy feels so distant, his story being set half a world away and over 3000 years ago. The cat, however, pictured below, connects me to a flesh-and-blood 11-year-old boy named Samuel right here, right now. Visualising the Australian Samuel of 2021 helps me better imagine the Jewish Samuel of approximately 1070 BC.
So what does the boy, Samuel, have to do with the cat? The cat in the photo above was born about a year before ‘my’ Samuel. She was part of Samuel’s family long before she ever became fond of me.
When Samuel was six years old and the cat seven, the family moved interstate. The cat stayed with me ‘just until the family got settled’. By that time, I was loathe to let her go. The family agreed that she could stay. Hence I am somehow related to Samuel’s family … through the cat.
Aussie Samuel
‘My’ Samuel is a fun-loving boy. He once changed the alarm for the timer on my phone to sound like a duck, and set it to go off during dinner. He just about fell of his chair in laughter as we adults tried to figure out where the quacking was coming from. Although I have since changed phones, I have kept the duck as my timer sound because it reminds me of a very special boy.
‘Aussie Samuel’ is an avid reader. After I visited them one time, he asked about my reading material for the trip home. “What do you like to read?” he asked. “I like a good story with some action,” I replied. Before I left, I had been persuaded to download an Alex Horowitz book called ‘Alex Rider – Stormbreaker’. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It looks rather out of place in my Kindle library amongst the more boring titles.
Perhaps you have an eleven-year-old boy in your life that you can picture as we work through this blog post about the Jewish youth, Samuel. For that Samuel, growing up in the Tabernacle of God under elderly Eli’s care, was just as much a flesh-and-blood kid as any other 11-year-old in any other time and place.
And so now let’s look at the story of ‘the call’ of the Jewish Samuel of three millennia ago.
The call
“Samuel, Samuel,” God called.
This was the first time that Samuel had heard God’s voice. It would not be the last.
What did the voice sound like, I wonder? Samuel assumed it was the voice of the old priest, Eli, at first, so it must have sounded similar. Some passages in the Bible sometimes describe the voice of God as being like that of a man, but at other times it is described as sounding like trumpet blasts and thundering water. In one instance, it was like a whisper in the silence.
In this case, Samuel twice responded to the voice by running to Eli. But then Eli instructed him to respond with the sentence that has been oft-repeated by praying people since: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
Interestingly, although Eli told him to say, “Speak, Yahweh, for your servant is listening,” Samuel omitted the name of God in his response to the divine call. Was he reluctant to speak the name of the Almighty One? He was quick to identify himself as the servant of the one calling him, at any rate.
God had news for Samuel, but it was a difficult news. God wanted this 11-year-old boy to know ahead of time how God would act in judgement against this family that had basically raised him. No wonder Samuel was afraid to tell Eli the next morning about the news he had received.
Eli had actually already been given this awful message of judgement – see 1 Samuel 2 – so it would not have come as a shock. If anything, the repetition of this message through young Samuel would have served to confirm to Eli that the words were from God himself. All Samuel had been told did indeed come to pass.
What God gave Samuel wasn’t exactly a call to a particular role, but foreknowledge. We talk of ‘Samuel’s Call’ but the extent of ‘the call’ was the voice in the night calling his name. God didn’t ‘call’ Samuel with a suggestion that Samuel might like to be a prophet. Samuel had no say in the matter. He called Samuel because he was a prophet and that’s what prophets do … they hear from God and relay what they hear.
I imagine that Samuel had gone to bed a child that evening. The next day, after a broken night’s sleep, he arose a young man with a heavy responsibility.
God’s call of others
At various times in history, God has very specifically ‘called’ individuals for particular tasks. Their ‘calls’ seldom came in the form of an invitation. Sometimes they were told what they were to do, but other times, they just found themselves living out God’s call on their lives.
Think of Adam and Eve, working in the Garden of Eden. Or of Joseph’s role in preparing a place of refuge for his family in Egypt, then Moses’ role some 400 years later in leading the people out again. One of my personal favourites is a man named Bezalel, whom God specifically chose and filled with his Spirit to be a master craftsman and a good teacher – that story is recorded in Exodus 31:1-5. Bezalel and his team made the beautiful things, rich with symbolism, in the tabernacle in which Samuel lived at the time of the events described in 1 Samuel 3.
As Christians, we are each filled with God’s Spirit and uniquely placed to play a role in God’s community, the church. The New Testament contains lists of possible roles for each of us. (See 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, for example.) Some of us are good at administration; others of us are powerful preachers. ‘The gift of encouragement’ is one that I particularly appreciate (Romans 12:8). We are to exercise our gifts and pull together as one body for the common good. Just look around and thank God for the way he has gifted us all differently.
Specific calls
At the same time, I admit that Samuel’s call was unmistakably clear. How do we know what God is asking of us today? I have never heard God’s voice calling, “Suzanne, Suzanne” in the middle of the night.
Books have been written in answer to the question, ‘How does God call us to specific roles today?’ The life of the Apostle Paul provides plenty of examples of a man receiving divine direction. Sometimes it was crystal clear; other times it was a decision made by a committee; sometimes it was a result of other options being blocked; other times certain directions were forced on him by circumstances.
Let me make a few suggestions about recognising and responding to God’s call on us to specific tasks, and illustrate them with a quick story of my own.
First, be open to what God might be asking of you. Be attentive to an unrest in your spirit or a spark of excitement.
Second, pray about it. Ask God to confirm or direct or ‘close doors’ and be looking for how he might be answering that prayer. Look for a sense of peace or dis-ease (not ‘disease’ but ‘dis-ease’ … though the two are quite similar).
Third, ask others whom you respect and who know you to pray with you. Ask for their prayerful feedback.
Fourth, try moving gently in that direction and see what happens. It might not be what you were expecting, but God’s sovereignty is reassuring.
A contemporary example
I have many stories which I could share to illustrate this discernment process, but will limit myself to just one.
In 2012, I moved back to Asia, where I had previously lived for a decade. I had seen a particular role advertised and my spirit had leapt at it. It involved teaching English in a small company while working alongside and under Asian brothers and sisters in a part of the world which fascinated me. I had prayed, talked with wise people and then applied to go. Other things with my role at that time in Australia were coming to a natural transition point. All up, it seemed like God’s hand was all over the move.
It was good to get back to Asia but nothing – nothing – worked out as I had anticipated. I will spare you the details but suffice to say that I wondered why on earth God had led me so clearly then … apparently … had dropped me.
The ‘member care manager’ of the network through which my placement was organised, however, saw things differently. She was retiring and had been praying about a replacement. When she had realised that I had experience in Asia, reasonable language ability in the majority language there and in English, and had worked in a sending office, she had decided that I was the object of God’s succession plan for her. When the labour permit, needed to get a long-term visa in the company in which I was to work, fell through, she quietly gave thanks. She invited me out for tea and explained her plan.
Never would I have applied for the role she had in mind for me. It involved office work, serving fellow foreigners, lots of administration, and, as I would soon realise, significant conflict. (Mostly, my involvement in conflict was as a concerned onlooker, just for the record.) All this was necessary for the organisation but none of it was appealing … not to me, at least.
Looking back, though, I can see that God’s hand was all over that placement. My unique mix of training, personality and history made me ideally suited to that role during a particularly tricky period of the network’s history. My profession made a visa relatively straightforward, as education was the focus of the local company through which we worked. Furthermore, the most rewarding ministry of my whole cross-cultural career came about through church involvement in that city at that time. That’s another story.
At the end of my three-year term, my work role finished … in fact, the whole network closed down … and I returned to Australia. As it turned out, I found myself in just the right place at just the right time to receive medical treatment for a serious but previously misdiagnosed medical condition. That is another story again.
In terms of ‘call’, then, let me just say that we don’t all hear voices in the night calling our name. God does, however, lead us through life as we actively listen. I count it a privilege to have participated in God’s work in that part of the world during that particular time.
Here and now
Will we … will I … say with Samuel, “Speak, for your servant is listening”?
What does it meant to listen?
As I write, one part of my mix-n-match job description … the study part … will come to a natural conclusion in the middle of the year. (Assuming, of course, that I work hard this semester.) As I consider what will take up that approximately 0.3 workload allocation, I will need to be looking, listening and praying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
Perhaps we are ‘called’ to do big, important things in God’s kingdom. Perhaps our roles are less flashy, such as those who are gifted encouragers and so play a significant but not obvious role in God’s work. Perhaps we are simply to endure through difficulties, keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus … though I hope that isn’t my call for this next chapter of life, and have no reason to expect that it will be.
Whatever our call, we are called to be ourselves, Spirit-filled gifted individuals, in the communities in which God has placed us. As we do this, ever attune to the nudges of the Holy Spirit, may God use us for his glory and the expansion and consolidation of his kingdom.
Back to the cat and her boy
The Samuel to whom I am somewhat related through the cat continues to grow up in a loving home with his parents, siblings and a dog. His life is far removed from that of the Biblical Samuel after whom he was named.
The same God who spoke to Jewish Samuel some three millennia ago continues to speak to us today. Sometimes his call is loud and clear. At other times it is calm and quiet. He does not always invite us to share in his work. Sometimes he just tells us what he is doing. And sometimes, we simply find ourselves living it.
My prayer for Australian Samuel is that as he matures into a young man, he, too, will respond to God’s call on his life with the words, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” That’s my prayer for his middle-aged cat-aunt too … that’s me, by the way.
God made us. God equips us. God knows us. God calls us.
How will we respond?
