Some days, like his morning,
I sit down here and the page is blank
and I don’t know what to say.
There are a couple thousand of you
waiting to hear a Word,
and my mind is blank,
and the page is blank.
And I wait… and nothing comes.
And I pray, “God,
what do people need to hear from you today?”
And I wait…
until I hear this:
that this question―
“What do people need to hear from you today?”―
is what we need to hear.
That each day we are sent into this world
to be a channel of God’s Word,
God’s healing, empowering, life-giving Word,
and we don’t always know how that word is pronounced,
how to convey it, what to say,
until we enter the day and meet the people.
That a good way to live a day
is to live it continually asking,
“What do people need to hear from God?”
and to live the day listening,
listening for God’s word,
not my own gripes and likes,
not my own opinion, but God’s Word,
and to speak that word
to whoever needs to hear it.
And the word is probably not made up,
but drawn from deep within,
if you’re really listening―
kindness, probably, or courage, or challenge, or hope―
a gleaming creation hidden in the silence
and spoken into the blank page of the moment,
a possibility they didn’t know they knew
until you said it.
―October 19, 2018