Stop, Look, Listen

I was driving on a road today when l noticed a train to my left going my direction.
I muttered a grunt as l noticed the extraordinary length of the cars connected to the engine, knowing l had to cross the railroad tracks two blocks away to get to my destination. The young lady to the right of me, however, had other plans. She was not going to wait for the entire length of the train and therefore zoomed ahead of me and barely made it in time to cross the tracks before the train crossed our street. I, unfortunately (and thankfully) had to endure the entire length of the train.
As l patiently waited, l noticed the round sign indicating railroad tracks. This brought me back to the days when the adage “Stop, Look, and Listen” were still the motto we lived by.

William Wordsworth, in his poem “The Excursion,” spoke of meeting a small boy holding to his ear a seashell “to which, in silence hushed, his very soul listened intensely.” Despite living very far from the seashore, the boy “heard murmurings” as he intently listened to which the boy “expressed mysterious union” with the ocean, resulting in “his countenance soon brighten[ing] with joy.”

Getting any boy to listen to anything in this day and age, whether intensely or otherwise, is a task best left to the experts. Even still, experts may not even necessarily offer any comforting word of advice to the most patient of parents.
Activity dominates most every single cell in their bodies, leaving a very small number to direct verbal commands to their busy brains resulting in the body’s difficulty to “Stop, Look, and Listen”.
Men, like little boys, also have a difficult time stopping. We don’t like to stop what we’re doing, simply because we just think that it’s just a waste of time. We don’t think we have to “Look”, since we already know what’s ahead of us. We have a great difficulty in Listening because as someone else is speaking, we’re already forming a rebuttal within our brain-housing group.
In the Old Testament days, the prophets who responded to God’s message had a difficult task ahead of them in delivering His message to the people. The people barely listened or half-heartedly accepted the message entirely, not to mention that they completely ignored the warnings, predictions, and the pleadings of the prophets.

In today’s society, we have the Bible, preachers in churches and on television, even gifted authors on every hand speaking God’s message. If we only we attentively listen to what God is saying, we will find that He is still offering “peace” and warning against “foolish ways.” And, like small boys with sea shells, our countenances will be “brightened with joy.”