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“Blink if you can hear me.” We’ve all heard that line in a movie or on an action-packed tv show. Maybe we’ve heard it in real life, possibly in a hospital room. 

Someone has been in an accident of some kind. Or for whatever reason, they’ve lost consciousness or the ability to function. Yet those around them are trying to communicate with them. Trying to get some sign that they are actually awake.

So, they simplify things. Get it down to one thing that perhaps the patient or their loved one might be able to do. “Blink if you can hear me.” 

I know this because in August of 1981, that was me. I woke up on an O.R. table during surgery. The room fell silent as they finally picked up on the reality that I was awake. Neither I nor they wanted for me to be. Eventually, I heard those words, although at the moment I was incapable of blinking, actually. 

Kyle Brooks writes on some of today’s scripture. We’re in Ezekiel 2: 1-5 and Psalm 123. He points out that it’s easy to view the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as marginal characters in strange circumstances distant from our contemporary times. 

But there are big things we can learn from watching the way prophets respond to their everyday situations. The prophets were known for the ways they critiqued the systems and figures of power and privilege in their time and space. 

Of course, this wasn’t just a bunch of wise guys popping off with their opinions. Any of us can tune into tv or social media to get a dose of that any time we want to these days. 

You can say practically anything you want to these days and have your message spread faster and farther than ever, with relatively little penalty to pay. We live in a virtual “Wild, wild West” where that’s concerned. 

These prophets were called of God. They became convinced that they must speak out. Usually, they truly were reluctant to do so. The typical biblical prophet hadn’t raised their hand. They didn’t seek the office. God sought them out and foisted the office upon their hesitant backs. 

They didn’t speak out with their own thoughts. These biblical prophets were conveying a word from God. Whether they wanted to or not, and despite the imminent danger precisely for doing so, they were willing verbal middlemen.  

What about our day and age? The church needs prophets now, just as then. Yet today, the life of the preacher who strays over into prophecy is just as fraught as it was then. The system simply isn’t set up to reward that grade of honesty. 

Today as then, the temptation to preach prophetically isn’t intended to irritate anyone at all. The intent is to speak truth on behalf of God, and as a fulfillment of a calling from God. Sometimes, that means speaking truth to power.

The job is to speak to people who, ironically, have fashioned their own thoughts and opinions as a standard of truth so that anything that doesn’t sound just like that will sound false and invasive. Ezekiel’s call was a perilous one, then, too. 

Do you ever find yourself saying. “How did we get here?” Do you ever find yourself saying, “I don’t even know how to live in today’s world.” Do you ever find yourself saying, “I wish things would just return to the way they used to be.” Do you ever find yourself saying, “I don’t know what God’s up to, and half the time I feel like I don’t even know where God is.” 

You are an exile of sorts. The hard news is that we got here collectively the same way Israel found itself in Babylon. Now, don’t shoot the prophet. 

How should we respond to Ezekiel’s calling and charge to speak, or any real and genuine prophet sent by God? Well, first of all we shouldn’t be surprised that a people whom God described as “rebellious” ended up rebelling when confronted about their rebellion. We ourselves can so easily rebel and become our own little gods.

But notice that Ezekiel’s job wasn’t to fix that. His job was to convey what God told him to say to them. Maybe to invite them into dialogue with God. I hope as you listen to your pastor, you might consider occasionally that what God is truly asking through them is for you to blink, if you are awake and listening.

DR. CHARLES QUALLS is senior pastor at Franklin Baptist Church. Contact him at 757-562-5135.