The Fifteen-Year-Old in the Snowstorm

On January 6, 1850, a fifteen-year-old boy named Charles Spurgeon trudged through a blizzard in Colchester, England. For months he had been restless with spiritual hunger, visiting church after church, reading theology beyond his years, desperate to hear something that would quiet the ache in his soul. He was hearing a voice he could not yet name.

The snow forced him into a tiny Primitive Methodist chapel on Artillery Street, where barely a dozen people had gathered. The regular preacher never arrived. A thin, unpolished man — likely a deacon — stepped to the pulpit and read from Isaiah 45:22: "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth."

The man's sermon was halting and simple. But then he looked directly at the miserable teenager in the back and said, "Young man, you look very miserable. And you will always be miserable if you don't obey my text. Look to Jesus Christ. Look! Look! Look!"

In that moment, Spurgeon finally heard clearly what God had been saying all along.

Like young Samuel lying in the temple, Spurgeon had been hearing the Lord's voice for months without recognizing it. He needed an unlikely Eli — an unnamed man in a half-empty chapel — to help him understand who was speaking. God's call came not in thunder but through a stammering stranger on a snowy morning. The question for us is the same it was for Samuel and for Spurgeon: when the voice comes, will we say, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening"?