The Radio Dial Between Stations

In 2019, a retired teacher named Margaret Chen sat in her kitchen in Portland, Oregon, fiddling with her late husband's old shortwave radio. She twisted the dial slowly, hearing nothing but static and fragments — a snatch of music here, a garbled voice there. She almost gave up. But her neighbor, a ham radio enthusiast named Bill, stopped by and said, "You're turning too fast. Slow down. When you hear even a whisper of a signal, stop and stay there."

Margaret did. She held still on one faint frequency, and within seconds, a clear voice broke through — a broadcast from New Zealand, crisp as a conversation across the table.

Young Samuel heard a voice three times in the night and mistook it for old Eli calling. He kept running to the wrong source. It took a mentor to teach him the simple but life-changing instruction: stop moving. Stay still. And when the voice comes again, answer it.

Most of us live with the dial spinning. We hear fragments of God's voice in a conversation, a nagging conviction, a passage that won't leave us alone — but we attribute it to coincidence or emotion and keep turning. We need our Elis, those seasoned believers who recognize what we cannot yet name, who say to us, "That stirring you feel? That's not random. Next time, hold still and say, 'Speak, Lord, for Your servant is listening.'"