You know how it goes. You’ve left your child in childcare somewhere (your church, your homeschool co-op, your MOPS group), and walked away despite the tears and cries and outstretched arms calling you back.
Then, halfway through your event, the unthinkable happens: Circumstances conspire to require you to walk past the room your child is in.
Oh, no. Please, not that.
But it can’t be avoided. So you do one of two things: either you run past that door like you’re Usain Bolt, or you drop to the ground before you can be seen by anybody inside, crawl past the room—way past—then stand up, flatten yourself against the wall, and edge a few feet farther away before you resume walking normally down the middle of the hall.
Because you know what would happen if you didn’t. If your child saw you, it would all be over. The wailing would begin, and this time, it wouldn’t stop. And you’d have to pick up your child and leave early.
You don’t even want to speak above a whisper if you’re anywhere close to the door, because if your child can hear you but can’t see you, that’s even worse.
Or, to put it less traumatically, let’s say you arrive at the room to pick up your child, and your child is busy playing and doesn’t see you right away. “So how’d it go?” you ask the caregiver, and all of a sudden, your child’s head whips around toward you. He registers the fact that Hallelujah! It’s Mommy!, and makes a mad rush toward you.
You could have been standing there for five minutes watching him, with other mothers talking all around you, while your child remained deeply absorbed in his play. But the minute he hears your voice—your voice, as opposed to any other mommy’s voice—he homes in on you and runs into your arms.
I think this kind of response is exactly what Jesus was referring to when He talked about sheep not following a shepherd whose voice they didn’t recognize. He knew the sheep would hear the voice of other shepherds. But they would reserve their best response for the shepherd whose voice they know.
God wants no less from us. He wants to be so special to us that His voice is the one we attend to, even in the midst of other (perhaps very necessary) pursuits. He expects us to hear those other voices—our children, our husband, our family and friends, our boss, our society—but His desire is that the minute we hear His voice, all those other voices become secondary. He wants to capture our focus merely by speaking, to know that we are so constantly attuned to His voice that we will hear Him even above all the other voices clamoring for our attention, and that we’ll respond.
May His voice become more known, more beloved to us, than any other. May we never focus so completely on earthly voices that we have no attention left for the Voice we most need to hear. And when that Voice speaks, may we respond like a little child:
Hallelujah! Daddy’s here!
John 10:3-5—“The sheep listen to [the shepherd’s] voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger…because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.” (NIV)