The Hum Only the Beekeeper Could Name

In the apiaries outside Asheville, North Carolina, a retired schoolteacher named Margaret Whitfield spent her first summer as an apprentice beekeeper convinced she would never learn the craft. Her mentor, seventy-two-year-old Earl Coggins, had kept bees for half a century. One August evening, Margaret heard a strange high-pitched piping rising from inside the hive — a sound different from the usual steady hum. She dismissed it as wind catching the frames.

Earl cocked his head. "You hear that?"

"It's just the breeze," Margaret said.

"No ma'am. That's a virgin queen piping. She's announcing herself. The whole colony is about to change."

Margaret listened again. The same sound she had brushed aside now carried weight and meaning. It had been there all along. She simply hadn't known what she was hearing.

Three times young Samuel heard his name called in the darkness of the temple at Shiloh, and three times he ran to Eli, certain the old priest had summoned him. Samuel wasn't deaf — he was untrained. Scripture tells us he "did not yet know the Lord; the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him." It took Eli, weathered and failing though he was, to say: it is the Lord. Go back and listen.

Sometimes God's voice is not absent — it is unrecognized. We need someone further down the road of faith to say, "That stirring you keep feeling? That restlessness you cannot explain? That is not the wind. That is the Almighty. Answer Him."