VT-Mustard Seed > Skits-n-Such

Voice:: Harrison! Harrison!
Harry:: (sitting up to an elbow and rubbing his eyes...) Hunh? What was that?
Voice:: Harrison! It’s the Lord, Harrison!
Harry:: (sits up completely, and looks up) Oh, hi, Lord!
Voice:: Harrison! I am about to....
Amanda:: What on earth are you doing, Harry?
Harry:: (quickly peering around) Whoa! Is that you, Amanda? Can’t you tell? I’m practicing, just like they said to do last week at Bible study. Weren’t you there?
Amanda:: Practicing? Bible study? I was there, but I don’t get it.
Harry:: I’m practicing listening to God’s voice. You know like Sam in the well in the Bible. I thought that was a pretty cool story, so I thought I’d see what it was like. Travis is helping me.
Amanda:: It figures, that laser brain! (calling). Come on out, Travis. Where are you?
Travis:: Over here. (coming in) I was being the voice of God. (rumbles out) “Harrison! Harrison!”
Harry:: And I was Sam in the well...though, that doesn’t sound too good, unless it was a Jacuzzi. Say, Amanda, you know that Bible stuff, did they have those in the Bible?
Amanda:: Jacuzzi? Not likely. “Sam in the well?” What’s that supposed to mean?
Travis:: (sheepishly) He means Sam-u-el, “Sam-in-the-well”. You know, the story of how God spoke to him at night.
Amanda:: Samuel! Harry, it’s Samuel, not “Sam-in-the-well!” Why didn’t you tell him, Travis? (he shrugs). So you were practicing listening for God’s voice?
Harry:: Yeah. It’s a bit scary, too. The only time I get called “Harrison” is when I’m in trouble. I hope God’s not mad at me or something.
Amanda:: Don’t worry, you only heard from Travis, not God. Besides, it wasn’t even very often in the Bible days that people heard the audible voice of God speaking from heaven.
Harry:: Automobile voice? Are you saying he sounds like a car? I hope it was a Mercedes—they have a cool purr...
Travis:: (laughing) Not automobile, “audible.” Like a quarterback does in football?
Harry:: Yeah? God calls audibles? Every time, you did that last year in football I lost the snap count.
Travis:: I remember. But I think she means something you can hear, right Mandy?
Amanda:: Right. Most of the time God doesn’t communicate to us with the kind of voice that Samuel heard. That has always been pretty rare except when Jesus was around.
Harry:: What happened then? Did God do a lot of talking out loud or something, with him?
Travis:: Think about it, Harry. Jesus was God. So when Jesus spoke people heard God speaking. That’s what she means.
Amanda:: Not bad for a laser brain. Actually, the most common way for people to hear God’s voice is in the Bible. What the Bible says, God says. So whenever you read the Bible you’re actually hearing him talk to you.
Harry:: Oh. So why do they call it God’s Word instead of God’s Words? Since there’s a lot of them shouldn’t it be Words?
Travis:: (laughing) Probably so. And that’s not the only way we can hear from God. Sometimes he also talks to us through our circumstances or through other people.
Harry:: Hunh? (looks quizzically to Amanda)
Amanda:: Travis is right. God sometimes uses people as his spokesmen and women. You already know about this—God speaks to us through the preacher. Other times he may use our youth director or even a friend. God uses their words to carry a message that he wants us to hear.
Harry:: Like sending in a player to the huddle with a special play from Coach, hunh, Travis?
Travis:: Exactly. Or he may bring about circumstances that make us choose to do what he wants us to do. It’s sort of like locking all the doors in a house except one, and then telling you to find someone in the one room with the open door.
Harry:: God plays “hide and seek” with us?
Amanda:: Well, not exactly. The point is that God can use what he brings about, the circumstances of our lives to teach us about himself, his purposes and his ways. All the time, he’s inviting us to know him more. But there’s another more direct way that we hear from God.
Harry:: How’s that?
Amanda:: It’s when we pray.
Travis:: (chiming in) Oh yeah. I had forgotten about that. Sometimes when we pray God brings verses to mind, or things from the Bible we’ve read, or maybe heard in a sermon or Bible study. He’s telling us something when that happens.
Harry:: That’s why I wanted to try to do what “Sam-in-the-well” did. I remembered the story. It was as if I heard someone saying to me, “Harry, I want to talk to you. I want to be your friend, too.” I was a little afraid, especially when he started calling me “Harrison.”
Amanda:: That was Travis calling you that, Harry. When God speaks to you and me, usually it will be to your conscience, in your mind. He will make you sense his presence, or recognize that there’s something in your life you need to fix, or some activity you should join him in, or some person you should tell about Jesus.
Travis:: It doesn’t have to be out loud to hear it, either!
Amanda:: No. God has made us so that we recognize his voice in our inner self when we bother to listen. The problem is that mostly we’re too busy doing other stuff to do that.
Harry:: So maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea for me to practice listening?
Amanda:: Not bad at all.
Travis:: And I know where there’s a well, Sam.
Harry:: Let’s go. Where there’s a well, there’s a way.
Amanda:: (calling after them) Did you guys hear anything?

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VT-Mustard Seed

Listen Up, Harry!

by Alan R. Wolcott