This week's text challenges individuals and your church community to examine how they respond to the persistent voice of God in their lives.

From Presbyterian author and editor John C. Purdy comes the title and story that inspired this week's sermon ideas. Purdy recalls that in The Blue Mountains of China (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), Canadian Mennonite/English Professor/author Rudy Wiebe tells the story of a Mennonite farmer named Sam Reimer. One night Sam hears a voice saying to him, "Samuel, Samuel ... I am the God of your fathers, the Lord your God. Go and proclaim peace in Vietnam." In perplexity, Sam goes to his pastor, who tells him to listen for the voice a second time. The next night the call comes again, but Sam cannot get anyone to believe that he has truly heard God's voice. His pastor won't believe it; neither will his wife or his fellow Mennonites. The Canadian government won't give him a visa to Vietnam; the inter-Mennonite Church Service Society won't help him. Sam's reaction to these rebuffs is to give up hope and die. On his deathbed he says to his wife, "When I heard the voice, I should of gone. Left a note and gone. When you know like that, are chosen, you shouldn't wait, talk. Go." (Returning God's Call [Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989], 10).

Sam Reimer heard the same call that came to Samuel the prophet. But Sam Reimer's call never materialized into a prophetic mission because the community of faith surrounding him failed to support him. If old Eli, despite his shortsightedness and personal failures, had not counseled the young Samuel on recognizing and responding to God's call, how could the fledgling prophet have learned to open his mind and heart to receive God's words?

C.S. Lewis said there are two kinds of people in the world: those who respond to God saying, "Thy will be done" and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way." It might also be said that there are two kinds of people who return God's call: those who say to God "Thy will be done" and those who respond to God by saying "All right, then, have it your way." As you return God's call this week, may you so stand in the stream of God's consciousness, that the waters of God's love and the waves of God's will may carry you in the directions the Spirit would have you go - toward the people God would have you meet and minister unto.