Voice Recognition

We just finished our spring pledge drive, a staple of public radio stations, and I couldn't be happier that we did it well and that it's done. It's an odd phenomenon - people responding to just voices over the air. And it's really odd to be the voice on the air doing the asking. I've build a bizarre career around asking people for money (nobody sets out to do this, I pretty sure) but it has always hinged on the powerful things that happen when people meet face to face. When there are no faces it all changes.

One of the most powerful moments of the pledge drive for me came when we got a gift from a very special friend of mine, a development consultant that I worked with and then, as an added blessing, became friends with. He's a "bear hug" friend, warm and open, and with whom I enjoy one of those rare, but special, occurrences, a friendship between a man and a woman of similar age with absolutely no ambiguity about it. Other people think it's rare, I guess, I seem to have a lot of those friendships - maybe it just says something about how men see me . . . oh, let's don't even go there. Not the point here at all.

Anyway, my friend was just driving through our region, scanning the radio dial, and he heard and recognized my voice. And he figured out why I was on the air, listened a bit, and called in a pledge. I was just tickled to read the comments that the phone answerer wrote down. He heard my voice and followed through.

That voice recognition is important and I think most of us have had that experience of feeling good at just hearing someone's voice. Or being sad when we miss hearing someone's voice. Or feeling intrigued when we first hear a new voice.

I wonder why, when we have such skill at recognizing the voices of people we love (or don't as the case may be) we, or at least I, have trouble recognizing the winsome voice of Christ when He speaks. We can pick out the unexpected voice of a friend on the radio, or the voice of a loved one across the room, our child's voice among a hundred others, but I have trouble discerning which voice is God's in the hubbub of it all.

"A still, small voice" is how I've often heard it described, but I'm thinking I need a big booming voice to give me direction, one that fills up all the spaces, that grabs my attention and just lays it all on the line. "Now hear this . . ." And then maybe it would be easier for me to turn the right way, make the hard choices, stay in the line I'm supposed to be in, weigh things with more of an eye to what's best from a spiritual stand point.

I would like to have a place on the radio dial where I could hear that voice, the one I love, and recognize it so clearly that I had no question about who was speaking, and I would be thrilled to be hearing it so clearly, and I would follow through. I hope I would.