Lent to the Lord

Recently I have with some intentionality been trying to remember my earliest memories as a child.  One of the interesting things discovered is the observation that my memory simply puts me down in a particular geographic setting with no explanation about how I got there.  My birth certificate tells me I started living in 1948, but my memory drops me down in this world some years later.  All of a sudden, I am there, or here.  When Samuel, the man whose name is inscribed over two books in the Old Testament, got to be an old man and allowed his memory to take hold, it could only put him down in the holy place where God was worshipped at Shiloh. 

 

The life his memory recorded for him surely began there for the Word speaks of his mother's act of devotion to God with the words, "Therefore I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he lives he is given to the Lord."  (I Samuel 1:28)  There is a difference in our actual memory and our learned memory.  Sometimes the two become one.  No doubt Samuel heard from his mother on her annual visit the explanation for his life in the holy place.  He could, therefore, not have any memory other than one which told him that his life was one to be lived in the service of God.

 

The 3rd chapter of I Samuel tells about the night Samuel, the young boy, came to embrace that divine reality for himself.  No matter what the hopes, dreams, and prayers of others are for us, we must also decide to choose and accept to hear what God is calling us to do with it.  Twice Samuel heard God calling him in the night only to think it was a spiritual mentor calling from the next room.  Only at the third call did he know it was not the voice of man, but the voice of God.  As surely as God's call fell on Samuel, it will fall on each one of us.  It is always up to us to embrace it.