Listening Beyond the Stars

Hi there, thanks for joining us for today's edition of Our Daily Bread. James Banks wrote our reading and he titled it, Listening Beyond the Stars. Imagine life without mobile phones, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth devices, or even microwave ovens. That's the way it is in the little town of Green Bank, West Virginia, known as the quietest town in America. It's also the location of the Green Bank Observatory, the world's largest steerable radio telescope. The telescope needs quiet to listen to naturally occurring radio waves emitted by the movement of pulsars and galaxies in deep space.

It has a surface area larger than a football field and stands in the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000 square mile area established to prevent electronic interference to the telescope's extreme sensitivity. This intentional quiet enables scientists to hear the music of the spheres. It also reminds me of our need to quiet ourselves enough to listen to the One who created the universe. God communicated to a wayward and distracted people through the prophet Isaiah, Give ear, and come to me.

Listen that you may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, says Isaiah 55-3. God promises his faithful love to all who will seek him and turn to him for forgiveness. We listen intentionally to God by turning from our distractions to meet him in scripture and in prayer. God isn't distant.

He longs for us to make time for him so he can be the priority of our daily lives and then for eternity. Today's Our Daily Bread devotional scripture reading is from Isaiah 55, verses 1-7. Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters, and you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk, without money and without cost.

Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear, and come to me.

Listen that you may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David. See, I have made him a witness to the peoples, a ruler and commander of the peoples.

Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations you do not know will come running to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel. For he has endowed you with splendor. Seek the Lord while he may be found.

Call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake their ways, and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. Let's pray. Dear God, help us to be still today and know that you are God. And in the stillness, may we hear your voice that often gets drowned out by all the noise that surrounds us. Thank you for the gift of knowing you and being able to talk with you any time of the day, Lord. It's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.