The Heart Murmur She Almost Missed

During her third-year clinical rotation at Johns Hopkins, medical student Anita Patel pressed her stethoscope to a patient's chest and heard nothing unusual — just the steady lub-dub she had memorized from textbooks. Her attending physician, Dr. Marcus Webb, listened next. "There," he said quietly, placing the stethoscope back in her ears and repositioning it over the exact spot. "Between the first and second sounds. Do you hear it?"

She didn't. He told her to close her eyes. To stop anticipating what she thought she should hear and simply listen to what was actually there. And then — faint, almost hidden beneath the rhythm she already knew — a soft whooshing sound. A mitral valve prolapse. It had been there the whole time. She just hadn't known how to hear it.

Samuel lay in the temple and heard his name called three times before old Eli recognized what was happening. The boy assumed it was the priest down the hall. He needed someone further along in the faith to say, "That sound you're hearing — that's not me. That's the Lord."

Most of us have had moments when something stirred inside us — a persistent nudge during prayer, an unsettled feeling about a decision, a verse that wouldn't let go. The voice of the Almighty was already speaking, but we needed an Eli — a pastor, a mentor, a grandmother who had walked with God for decades — to help us recognize it.

The call was already there. We just needed someone to say, "Listen again. That's Him."