Please Stay on the Line
“Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line and a customer service representative will be with you momentarily.”
If there’s a more self-aware lie in our western society, I don’t know what it is. No one believes it when they hear it on hold, and I doubt anyone recording the message believes it themselves. Your call is not important to the sprawling mega-corporation you are trying to reach, and a customer service representative will not be with you for a painfully long time, exacerbated by the fifteen loops you will have to hear of Celine Dion singing the theme song from Titanic.
Finally, after an excruciating 67 minutes and 48 seconds of “My Heart Will Go On,” another member of our species will pick up the phone. If you’re lucky, they’ll have a basic to moderate understanding of your native language—but no amount of luck will connect you to anyone with the authority to help you with the issue you’re calling about. They might offer to transfer you to someone with the ability to resolve your problem…would you mind if they just put you on hold for a moment?
At this point you will consider either crushing the phone with your bare hands or living the rest of your days atop an isolated hill where the closest thing to hold music comes from the lively birds chirping outside your window. Also if any of them sound like Celine Dion, you can shoot them.
Straight to the top
As a general rule, giant companies don’t care about you. When you measure your customers in terms of millions, the complaints or concerns of one single individual are frankly trivial—and if they get discouraged from chasing down one too many dead-ends in an attempt to contact you, well, you probably won’t lose much sleep about it. Even if you forever lose their business, the impact on your bottom line would be nearly unnoticeable.
That’s what makes God so incredible. God, who created the entire universe out of nothing, who alone can claim the riches of every galaxy and every planet—God, who needs nothing from us and who owes nothing to us—that same God hears and listens to us when we pray to Him.
Just to put that into perspective, imagine being able to pick up your phone and call the personal number of, say, the CEO of Walmart—no hold music, no wait times, just picking up your phone and speaking directly to the leader of a multinational corporation, whether it’s because you need a problem resolved or assistance in reaching some goal.
We can do that—except instead of a CEO, we have a direct line of contact to the Creator and Master of everything ever.
God is listening
So I guess the real question here is, are you and I putting that line of contact to use? Because it’s not just that we can talk to God, it’s that we’re actively encouraged to talk to God. Peter wrote to remind us to “humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God…casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you” (1 Peter 5:6-7). God cares about you. He wants to hear from you.
After the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem, God told Solomon, “My eyes will be open and My ears attentive to prayer made in this place. For now I have chosen and sanctified this house, that My name may be there forever; and My eyes and My heart will be there perpetually” (2 Chronicles 17:15-16). The Bible reveals that God’s temple today is composed of His people (1 Corinthians 3:17)—so we can pray to God with absolute confidence that He is attentively listening to everything we bring before Him. What an incredible privilege that is!
But how often are we using it?
Until next time,
Jeremy
