From his book ‘Memorable Stories and Parables by’ Boyd K. Packer wrote…
Many years ago John Burroughs, a naturalist, one summer evening was walking through a crowded park. Above the sounds of city life he heard the song of a bird. He stopped and listened. Those with him had not heard it. He looked around. No one else had noticed it. It bothered him that everyone should miss something so beautiful.
He took a coin from his pocket and flipped it into the air. It struck the pavement with a ring no louder than the song of the bird. Everyone turned; they could hear that. It is difficult to separate from all the sounds of city traffic the song of a bird. But you can hear it. You can hear it plainly if you train yourself to listen for it.
One of our sons has always been interested in radio. When he was a little fellow, his Christmas present was a very elementary radio construction set. As he grew and as we could afford it, and as he could earn it, he received more sophisticated equipment. There have been many times over the years, some very recently, when I have sat with him as he talked with someone in a distant part of the world. I could hear static, interference and a word or two, or sometimes several voices at once. Yet he can understand, for he has trained himself to tune out the interference.
It is difficult to separate from the confusion of life that quiet voice of inspiration. Unless you attune yourself, you will miss it. Answers to prayers come in a quiet way. The scriptures describe that voice of inspiration as a still small voice. If you really try you can learn to respond to that voice.
In the early days of our marriage, our children came at close intervals. As parents of little children will know, in those years it is quite a novelty for them to get an uninterrupted night of sleep. If you have a new baby and another youngster cutting teeth, or one with a fever you can be up and down a hundred times a night. (That, of course is an exaggeration. It’s probably only twenty or thirty times.)
We finally divided our children into “his” and “hers” for night tending. She would get up for the new baby, and I would tend the one cutting teeth. One day we came to realize that each would hear only the one to which we were assigned and would sleep very soundly through the cries of the other.
We have commented on this over the years, convinced that you can train yourself to hear, to see and feel what you desire, but it takes some conditioning. There are so many of us who go through life and seldom, if ever, hear that voice of inspiration, because “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).
From the book “Memorable Stories and Parables by Boyd K. Packer”, 1997 Bookcraft, Salt Lake City, Utah p.42-4
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