If you haven’t yet seen the video above, I strongly recommend that you do now.  The clip is only three minutes long but its impact could end up being much greater.  I don’t know who made the video or what its original purpose was, but I know that it has gone viral on YouTube and has been viewed by hundreds of thousands and talked about by even more.

But after watching the video several times, one thought keeps popping into my head...

SO WHAT?  Is that the goal?  Just to waste three minutes watching a video and that’s it?

My fear is always that I see a video like this, shed a tear, send out a tweet, and then go back to life as usual.  I don't ever want to become desensitized or unable to discern and take action on the messages God is sending me throughout my day.

And this video’s a perfect example.  Touching message and that’s it?  Or maybe God wants me to change or take action in some way?

We ask to hear God’s voice.  We pray that He will speak to us.  We beg Him to manifest Himself in our lives.  But then when He does, we are often too busy to stop for 5 minutes and digest it.  We go right back to the busyness of life – saying “that was a nice message” or “very touching video” or “I wonder how many retweets I’ll get if I post this?”.

Yet all the while, the message never sinks in.  It never hits home.  We don’t allow it to take root.  We receive it on the surface only and that’s it.  A seed that sits on the surface and never goes deeper will never bear fruit – it will be blown away quickly and be lost forever.

This post might be a message from God.  That email that you just got could be a message from God.  That random thought that keeps popping in your head – those could all be messages from God.Those seeds are the messages God sends us every day.

PLEASE NOTE:  I am not saying that those things are DEFINITELY messages from God.  I am saying that they MIGHT be messages from God.  Don’t take my words and go off the handle and start believing that every random thought is a sign from God.  The Bible says “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” (1 John 4:1)

My point is not that they ARE signs from God, but rather that they MIGHT be signs from God and therefore it is worth pausing for a few minutes of prayer to “test the spirits.”

Ok?  Clear?  So don’t tell me that you are moving to Hawaii because you heard a commercial on the radio about cheap airfare to Hawaii at the exact same time that you were wearing your favorite Hawaiian shirt and watching reruns of Fantasy Island.

I don’t want to be responsible for that.

But I also don’t want to be responsible for ignoring a message from God.  I don’t want to fulfill the words spoken by Jesus 2000 years ago in Matthew 13:14-15:

“Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,
And seeing you will see and not perceive;
For the hearts of this people have grown dull.
Their ears are hard of hearing,
And their eyes they have closed,
Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,
Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
So that I should heal them.”

Those are scary words and I pray they never apply to you or me.  Don’t you?

So with that said, let’s go back to the video above.  That video spoke powerfully to me and I’m sure that if you give it a chance, it will do the same for you too.

Agree or disagree?  Do you think God may be speaking to you through that video?  How so?  What might He be saying?  Anything at all?  Or just another way to waste time at work for 3 minutes?