In the Gospel of Mark chapter 4, Jesus begins his parable of the seed with “Listen” and he ends with “Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand.” This took me back to a time in the 70s when we shouted out on our CB Radio (Citizen’s Band Radio) “Breaker, Breaker, has anybody got their ears on?” Coming from a truck driving family, a CB radio was a big deal. The perfect Christmas gift, along with a great antenna for better reception, was a fun new way of communication. Many of our friends had one as well.  We all made up a “handle” (name) that we identified ourselves with so we could talk.  When we were ready to communicate with our friends, we would call out on channel 19 (talk channel) to see who had their ears on. It might be a friend, a stranger nearby 😳, or someone in another country, all depending on the time of the day or night. If we could not understand them, we turned up the squelch to drown out some of the noise.
In this parable Jesus is calling out not just to his disciples but to all those listening in the crowd. He is asking them, “do you really have your spiritual ears on to a point of understanding what I am saying?” Many times, we have our ears on, we hear the call, but ever so quickly, the voice fades away. Could it be our antenna has suddenly turned directions? Then, hearing the call again, we answer, but instead of fine tuning our channel we tune to another voice coming on as well. “O this is the call I need” we say, because we like the tickling of our ears and we do not turn back to find the True voice. Then there are other times the call is loud and clear. We rejoice at what we just heard. We claim “this is just what I needed to hear!” “O what joy!”  Only to get up the next morning with a sadness of holding on to a lifeless memory that was once our hope, the channel is lost. Perhaps if we had just turned the squelch up a bit to drown out the other voices, turned the knob a little to the right, we might had gotten better reception? So, what do we do with the True call we long to hear, to keep tuned to? How can we know that we know that this is the One? The answer is in the preparing to hear that still small voice. It is the fine tuning from coming over and over to the same channel. The same time of listening with “ears to hear” to The Voice that quiets our souls, that refreshes the mind to a place of rest. Knowing that this is our channel day or night that we can call out to and respond to  “the Lover of our souls” and we answer with  “I got my ears on ready hear what You have to say!”