The Murmur She Almost Missed

During her third year at Johns Hopkins, medical student Priya Desai pressed a stethoscope to a patient's chest and heard nothing unusual. Just the steady thump of a healthy heart. Her attending physician, Dr. Reeves, a silver-haired cardiologist with thirty years of experience, gently took the stethoscope back and repositioned it two inches to the left. "Now close your eyes," he said. "Don't listen for what you expect. Listen for what's actually there."

Priya tried again. And then she heard it — a faint whooshing between beats, a mitral valve prolapse that had gone undiagnosed for years. The sound had been there the whole time. She simply hadn't known what she was listening for.

"The hardest part of medicine," Dr. Reeves told her afterward, "isn't learning to speak. It's learning to hear."

When young Samuel heard a voice calling his name in the darkness of the Shiloh temple, he didn't ignore it. He responded immediately — but he ran to the wrong person. Three times he heard, and three times he mistook God's voice for Eli's. It took an older, more experienced believer to reposition his ear: "Go lie down, and if He calls you, say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.'"

God is still speaking. The voice hasn't gone silent. But sometimes we need a wise mentor to help us recognize the sound — to teach us that the Lord who made our ears is the very One calling our name.