Across the Pastor’s Desk by Joshua Enderson

“As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.” — 1 Samuel 3:19

I love the story of Samuel’s call story, found in 1 Samuel 3:1-19. The young boy Samuel was living in the temple, assisting the priest Eli in the temple.

One night, as Samuel lied down to sleep, a voice called to him, “Samuel! Samuel!”

The young boy jumped up and ran to Eli, thinking that the old man was in need of something. Eli said that he didn’t call the boy and told him to go back to bed. Two more times this happened, and finally, on the third conversation, Eli recognized that it is God who is calling the young boy.

Eli told him to say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” when he heard his name called again.

Young Samuel did this, and received a message from God, a message that would set Samuel on the path of doing God’s work in the world.

After this, we read that “as Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.”

We are, like Samuel, often called to speak into the pain and suffering of the world around us.

We hear about tragedies around the world and in our community. We hear about an illness of a friend, or that someone close to you has lost a loved one. When we see that friend, we know that we have to say something to them, but we never feel like we have the right words.

What can we say to someone affected by senseless suffering? How do we respond to the pain and struggle that the person in front of us is going through? We offer words of hope and sympathy, comfort and love.

But, I think that many of us often feel like our words are inadequate, or that we really didn’t say anything of value to them at all.

Samuel’s call story reminds us of something very important about the words of hope that we speak to others in pain. They may seem inadequate to us, but God is at work in those words, too.

I’ve been amazed at the number of times someone has come up to me and said that something that I said was meaningful to them, even in situations where I felt like I had said nothing of value.

God can use us and our words in ways that we can’t even imagine, speaking hope to the hopeless, comfort to the disparaging, humility to the prideful and love to hurting. Words that seemed to fall flat in our minds take flight when God uses them.

Just like Samuel, God will not let the words of God’s people “fall to the ground.”

They will always accomplish far more than we can imagine.

Joshua Enderson is the pastor at Hayward and Trondhjem Lutheran churches.