If You Listen...

I recently saw Will Smith's newest cinematic offering I Am Legend, and besides it being a special-effects-sizzling, heart-thumping adrenaline rollercoaster, it also harbors a golden thread of spirituality that raised the peach fuzz on my arms.
With sincerity shining in her eyes, a female plague survivor tries to restore the faith of Will Smith's battle-weary epidemiologist character by telling him: "If you listen, you can hear God's plan."
Any time I hear such words of wisdom, I feel a calm and a faint sadness sweep through me. Calm, because I am reminded to slow down. Sadness, when I recall how the world tricks us into believing in the hustle and bustle of man's schedule instead of in the Creator's.
I feel, sometimes, that either the world is moving too fast and I have to struggle to keep up with it, or I am moving too fast to process the world around me.
Moving too fast to listen, either way.
Listening. It's a skill I need to improve.
Sometimes it seems like I'm so eager to hear what someone has to say that I'm not actually listening to them. Not actually processing their words or all of the ideas they are encoding. We are too busy skimming, speed-reading and texting to listen. The Cliff's Notes version and the "quick and dirty" are all we have time for. Just the nuts and bolts.
Too busy to listen.
Too deafened by the rush-hour traffic, ringing cell phones, the running for buses, trains and planes, the stress of beligerent bosses, dwindling deadlines, family obligations and crushing bills.
We can't hear His plan. The plan. The only one that matters...because we are too busy listening to man's plan.
Many of us are dissatisfied with our lives. Trapped in jobs that we hate and living lonely existences. Like ghosts, we drift through time, never leaving a trace or a mark that we were ever there.
We tell time according to what comes on tv when. We mark how much fun we've had by how many drinks we've drained. And how adventurous we are by how many beds of different partners we've rolled out of.
And for some of us, maybe this is living and a meaningful way to pass the endless hours we've been given on earth. But I've always felt differently.
One day, while working at a job that I particularly despised, I had a thought:
There's gotta be more to life than just waiting to die.
Now, I'm sure I'm not the only person who's ever had this thought. But I can't say I've ever heard people talking about it in conversation. What a long, gray, bleak block of nothingness life would be if we were all here to just pass the time. Like black-and-white snow on a tv screen, with no picture or sound.
And that's when I heard an answer to my thought.
"There is more to life than just waiting to die."
The truth is that we are born, and one day we die, returning to the ashes from whence we came. But birth and death are the front and rear covers to a thick book that is supposed to be filled with the pages of stories of a life well lived. Like the saying goes: The best we can do with the time we are each given is to spend it wisely.
Most of us are born with an enormous fortune: TIME.
How will you spend yours?
If you listen, you will probably hear clues about the best way to spend yours.
When I listen, I hear that I am a writer. Sometimes, when I read a magazine or a newspaper, or when I'm watching the rolling credits after a movie, I see the word "Editor," and I feel a pang in my heart because I know I should be spending some of my fortune by working in an editorial role. I've always wanted to, yet I've done nothing about it. Other times, I'll go to one of my favorite places in the world, a bookstore, and as I walk through the endless shelves, I'll feel a deep longing to writing my own bestseller.
In this life, there is so much to learn. At the top of that list is listening.
Maybe one day we'll get it right. And when we do, maybe we'll hear a snippet of the Divine plan, or at least a word or two about the small part we play in that plan... and how to wisely invest the enormous fortune we've been given.