My husband and I went to visit his parents at the place they stay for the summer. They had just gotten there the week before and promptly my father-in-law lost one of his very expensive hearing aids. My in-laws searched high and low for the hearing aid, but to no avail. New carpet had been recently put in, with a variegated design, which made the search even more challenging. So when we arrived they asked us to join the search. We looked all over the house, mostly on our hands and knees, we scoured the living room, bedroom, couches, chairs... between the bed and the wall, and I even looked in the car parked in the garage. We searched for about 20 minutes, with no luck. Then we all decided to stop, with the intent of resuming the search later.
My husband and his dad went upstairs to check on the computer, and I went to sit down on the couch with my mother-in-law, when all of a sudden, I said aloud, "Duh! God knows where the hearing aid is, all we have to do is ask!"
My mother-in-law looked skeptical! So I sat down, closed my eyes, got really quiet and listened. Then the idea came that the answer was 'vertical'. I said to God, "Well, we've looked in a lot of 'vertical' spots already... You're gonna have to be a bit more specific!" Instantly the idea came to get a flashlight and go out to the car again. My mother-in-law said there was no way the hearing aid would be out in the car.
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| Prayer is not just talking to God, it's listening to God. |
Nonetheless, I obediently returned to the garage, opened the car door and checked around the driver's seat again. Since my father-in-law is the car's primary driver, that seemed logical, but alas, no hearing aid. But then the thought came to go to the other side. I followed the divine directive and went to the other side to look around the seat using the flashlight. And there it was!!! 'Vertically' stuck between the seat and the console, at the very bottom.
I ran into the house, showed my mother-in-law the hearing aid, and she said in astonishment, "How did you find it?" I said, "God told me where it was." She looked dumbstruck and said, "Well, He must have."
Later I was telling the story to one of our sons. He does not consider himself very religious but he does like to think, and is a deep thinker at that. In discussing the incident with him I shared the idea that I considered this situation to be decidedly different than the typical "remembering where you left something -- like 'oh, I misplaced my keys and can't find them. Then all of a sudden you remember where they are'. I reminded him that since we had just arrived when we were asked to look for the hearing aid, that it had been misplaced prior to our arrival, and I had no way of knowing where it was, nor could I retrace the steps that lead to its misplacement. He was a little blown away by this.
In concluding my discussion with him, a thought came to me that I've heard attributed to Einstein and other great scientific thinkers. It is the concept that their most brilliant ideas were not the product of concerted effort, rather the ideas "just came to them". To me that is called listening. We consider thinkers like Einstein to be men of genius. So then, perhaps 'true genius' is focused listening. And when we focus on listening to God, the result is healing.