Now the Lord came again in the night, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, your servant is listening.” – 1 Samuel 3:10 (NRSV, adapted)
Eli was the priest of the shrine at Shiloh. His two sons helped him with his ministry, although mostly they helped themselves to the meat people brought to sacrifice. Their corruption infuriated Eli, but he was weak. Like most conflict-averse people, he hoped the problem would just go away.
It didn’t. Shiloh was emblematic of a world gone very wrong, devoid of the Presence and the Voice. “The word of the Lord was rare in those days,” Scripture says, “and visions were not widespread.” Why would God show up if nobody’s looking? Why speak if nobody’s listening?
Yet even at Shiloh “the lamp of God had not yet gone out” altogether. The Bible says there was still a flicker, still a chance. And that chance had a name—Samuel, Eli’s little acolyte. Out of the blue, in the dead of night, God broke the silence to talk to a kid in pajamas.
Samuel didn’t know it was God, and the chance nearly died. But Eli had enough sense left to realize that the Lord was back. So he taught Samuel the most important words anyone can ever say—“Speak, God I’m listening.” The next time God spoke to him, Samuel replied, and soon Shiloh became a place where people could find God again.
Why God chose a boy with bed head, we’ll never know. There’s no accounting for God’s choices. There’s only the accounting we’ll have to make if God calls us and we don’t answer, or if God calls others and they don’t answer because no one taught them how to, or if we let the lamp go out when there’s still a flicker, a slim chance that has our name written all over it.
Speak, God. I’m listening.
