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One of the first times my husband and I had a conversation was at morning break at our on-campus job.
He repeated the same sentence to me multiple times before I finally understood what he was saying.
My husband is from a small island in the Caribbean called Barbados. He has a strong accent, somewhat similar to a Jamaican accent. Over the years, I have grown to where I barely hear his accent, and I'm surprised when others have trouble understanding him.
From being around him, I've realized that in order to understand various accents, particularly foreign ones, we have to listen differently.
When we're listening to people with accents that we are used to, our brains get a little lazy. Listening becomes automatic, done with little thought. When it's time to listen to someone with an unfamiliar accent, it's difficult to turn that back on.
Understanding a heavy accent is almost like reading someone's sloppy handwriting or deciphering a code. You look for words you can understand and then use the shape of those letters to decipher the others. When listening to someone with an accent, listen for the words you can understand. Once you can understand a few words, use them to piece together the other words. It takes a litle time, but once you're used to listening more carefully, unlocking someone's accent will come more easily.
In the same way, listening to God comes by learning to listen differently. But instead of training your ears, you train your spirit.
One of the problems I've had with hearing God is that I try to focus with and listen with my ears, even though I'm not expecting an audible voice. Then I find myself hearing EVERYTHING -- the car passing by, the dog barking next door, the hot water heater kicking on, the clock ticking on the wall. My failure to listen with my spirit finds me hearing everything else instead of what I want to hear -- God's voice.
When you want to start hearing from God, ask Him to quiet your spirit, not the world around you. Ask Him to train your spirit to hear the words He is speaking.
In the same way that understanding accents comes piece by piece, each time you hear God speaking is an opportunity to learn His "accent" and be better able to hear Him next time.
