Learning To Respond

You get it handed to you after you place your order.
It is square and fits in the palm of your hand.
It has little lights around each side.
It will alert you when your food is ready.

No matter how many times I am handed one of these buzzers, I am still surprised.
I know that it will light up eventually.
I know that it will make a loud sound as well.
I am never prepared.

One of my daughters and I went out to lunch and were given one of these buzzers.
We sat in a booth and began to talk.
The buzzer was placed on the middle of the table.
As we were in our conversation, the buzzer lit up, buzzed, and vibrated.

The square buzzer danced across the table.
I caught it before it reached the edge.
I brought it up to the counter and placed it in the basket.
Our food was ready and waiting.

Some of the square buzzers in the basket were still buzzing and vibrating.
They were making a lot of noise seemingly for no reason.
I did not see an on/off switch.
I was sure an employee would know how to silence them.

I remember when I got my first cell phone many years ago.
It was a flip phone.
It was quite small and fit into a pocket in the back of my purse.
It was for my family to reach me.

I brought it to back to school night.
My older daughters were home with their younger siblings.
They knew that if there was a problem, they could call me.
I remember sitting in a science lab room at the middle school.

The teacher was going over the syllabus.
The teacher was explaining what was expected of each student.
My phone was in front of me on the lab table just in case.
I knew that I had silenced my phone when the back to school night began.

Suddenly, without warning, my small flip phone danced across the lab table.
It moved so fast, vibrating as it moved.
I remember thinking that it looked like a jumping bean.
I was embarrassed and did not know how to turn it off, short of answering the phone.

I went out into the hallway with the phone vibrating in my hand.
There was no way to hide the sound.
There was no way to hide my red face.
There was nothing I could do but answer the call.

Do you ever think about how many times a day you hear a buzz or a beep?
Do you ever think about how many times a day you hear some device alerting you?
We are bombarded with sounds all day long.
Some sounds are welcome; some are not.

We start our day with an alarm telling us to wake up.
We may wait for the beep of the microwave as we make oatmeal or heat our coffee or tea.
The refrigerator beeps if you leave the door open too long.
The washer and dryer beep to tell you the load of laundry is done.

All day long we hear sounds that inform, alert, or remind.
We have gotten so used to relying on these sounds, we can easily distinguish one from another.
No two beeps are the same; we know for certain which device is making the sound.
If you think about it, we have become like Pavlov’s dogs as we respond to our devices.

During the 1890s, Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov was looking at salivation in dogs in response to being fed when he noticed that his dogs would begin to salivate whenever he entered the room, even when he was not bringing them food. At first, this was something of a nuisance. Pavlov (1902) started from the idea that there are some things that a dog does not need to learn. For example, dogs don’t learn to salivate whenever they see food. This reflex is ‘hard-wired’ into the dog. In behaviorist terms, it is an unconditioned response…However, when Pavlov discovered that any object or event which the dogs learned to associate with food (such as the lab assistant) would trigger the same response, he realized that he had made an important scientific discovery. Accordingly, he devoted the rest of his career to studying this type of learning…In behaviorist terms, the lab assistant was originally a neutral stimulus. It is called neutral because it produces no response. What had happened was that the neutral stimulus (the lab assistant) had become associated with an unconditioned stimulus (food). In his experiment, Pavlov used a bell as his neutral stimulus. Whenever he gave food to his dogs, he also rang a bell. After a number of repeats of this procedure, he tried the bell on its own. As you might expect, the bell on its own now caused an increase in salivation. So the dog had learned an association between the bell and the food and a new behavior had been learned. (Simple Psychology 2007, updated 2013)

We hear a buzz or beep and immediately know what is vying for our attention.
We know the sound and we have become conditioned to respond to it.
We can distinguish one sound from another.
We are used to the sound and what it means.

See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end. As has just been said: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion. (Hebrews 3:12-15)

We must learn to be so conditioned to the sound of God’s voice.
We must learn to respond.
We are not to respond in some robotic way, rather we are to respond with our heart.
As long as it is Today, we still have time to respond to the call of God.

Learn to listen to the voice of God in His Word.
Learn to listen to the voice of God as He speaks to your heart.
We will be so conditioned to hear His voice, we will respond to His voice alone.
We will learn to tune out other voices that will pull us away from the Living God.

If we can distinguish one sound from another, we can hear God’s voice above all others.
We can hear Him Whisper.
We can hear Him in the stillness.
We will learn to respond only to Him.