Understanding God’s Busy Signal

If you were born after 1990, chances are that you’ve never experienced one of the most frustrating phenomena of analog communication: the busy signal. If you’ve never heard one, or are feeling nostalgic, you can sample it here. A busy signal indicated that the person you were trying to call was, well, busy. The original intent was to inform the caller that the other party’s line was functional but currently in use, as opposed to being broken or disconnected. The assumption was that the person you were trying to call was already engaged in another conversation, but sometimes people would intentionally not put the receiver back in its cradle, also known as “leaving it off the hook”, which served as what a Gen-Zer might call a legacy do-not-disturb: the recipient’s phone wouldn’t ring, and the caller would get a busy signal.

Busy signals were annoying — not because the tone itself was all that irritating (after all, as soon as you recognized it, you would just hang up), but because of what it indicated. The person on the other end wasn’t available to talk to you, because they were (at least supposedly) talking to someone else. There was no way to know when the other conversation would end, so you had to wait a while and try again. Having multiple telephone lines was considered an unjustifiable luxury for most families, so many were the teenagers who got in trouble for hogging the phone for hours with adolescent nonsense causing more important callers to get an incessant busy signal.

Constantly getting a busy signal could make you feel shunned and ignored. Prior to call waiting and in-line voicemail systems, there was no way to let the other party know that someone else was trying to reach them, and no way to leave them a message. It was remarkably frustrating and dehumanizing to realize that, regardless of the importance of your message, it wasn’t even worthy of falling on deaf ears, because the busy signal prevented you from even getting that far.

That feeling of disengaged abbandoment was highlighted by American singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson in his 1968 hit single “One”. The version you’re likely familiar with is actually the cover that Three Dog Night cut a year later and got as high as #5 on the billboard charts because that was the one that was played on the radio. That’s unfortunate, as Three Dog Night diluted the original genius of the song with their rock-n-roll sound. You see, Nilsson composed the song while listening to the busy signal after unsuccessfully trying to call someone, and the steady, somewhat monotonous chord progression featured throughout the piece was intended to mimic the beep, beep, beep of a busy signal. This is much harder to notice in Three Dog Night’s version, in which the drums and electric guitars drown out the keyboard, the vocals are highlighted, and the song ends abruptly instead of reprising the intro like the original does. However, in Nilsson’s original cut, which is much more acoustically focused, the busy signal is unmistakeably the prominent feature, and once you realize what Nilsson is doing, you won’t be able to hear it any other way.

Understanding that the song was inspired by a busy signal amplifies the significance of the lyrics.

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It’s the loneliest number since the number one

“No” is the saddest experience you’ll ever know
Yes, it’s the saddest experience you’ll ever know
Because one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever know

It’s just no good anymore since you went away
Now I spend my time just making rhymes of yesterday

Because one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever know

It’s unknown if the person Nilsson was trying to call was a girlfriend who had just jilted him, but the lyrics make me think that was probably the case. Whether in the context of a romantic relationship or something else, I’m sure that you can identify, as I do, with the pain of rejection, the “no” that leaves you unfulfilled and isolated, and the beep, beep, beep of the busy signal that can pound you like a jackhammer into depression.

Do you feel like all you ever get from God is a busy signal? Doesn’t it seem sometimes as if heaven doesn’t even use modern technology? I mean, if God were to put you on do-not-disturb, you’d at least get to leave a message, but when was the last time you heard, “Hello, this is God. I’m sorry I can’t talk right now, but leave your name, number, and a brief message, and I’ll get back to you.” Instead, all you get is the droning beep, beep, beep of a busy signal. And along with it comes the feeling of loneliness, abbandonment, and isolation that says to you that God isn’t just not hearing you, He doesn’t care.

Ask anyone who doesn’t believe in God why they hold that opinion, and chances are they will tell you it’s because of a busy signal. No, they won’t use those words, and you might get the Three Dog Night version, but after you peel away the drums of philosophy, the electric guitars of rationalization, and the vocal distractions of pseudo-science, you’ll hear it. God’s never done anything for me. He lets all this evil in the world to exist and does nothing about it. He’s let me down big time. In fact, I tried calling Him once, but all I got was a busy signal.

Ironically, the busy signal seems to hurt worse if you do belive in God, because you know it’s not supposed to be like that. Psalm 34:15 says,

The eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous
And His ears are open to their cry.

The Apostle John declares the same thing more emphatically.

This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him. (1 John 5:14-15)

James even makes it sound easy when he matter-of-factly states,

The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the earth for three years and six months. Then he prayed again, and the sky poured rain and the earth produced its fruit. (James 5:16-18)

That last one has always been tough for me to digest. Elijah was just like us, and God turned off the rain for three and a half years and then turned it back on again simply because Elijah asked Him to. Can’t you just see James wiping his hands as if to say, “See? Nothing to it. Easy peasy.” So let me ask you: when was the last time you started or stopped a drought? Yeah, me neither. Busy signal.

What in the world did David, John, and James know that we don’t? What was Elijah’s secret? We know that God has an infinite capacity for hearing us, so it’s not like we can overwhelm His telephony system. Why then do we keep hearing busy signals, and how do we get around them?

If I’m being brutally honest, I must admit that, more often than not, God’s the one hearing the busy signal, not me.

James gives us a couple of reasons for getting busy signals in chapter 4 of his letter. The first is that we don’t receive because we don’t ask (James 4:2). While you can’t get a busy signal without first hearing a dial tone, it’s a whole lot easier to blame God for not listening and not responding than it is to admit you’re not talking. If I’m being brutally honest, I’m not nearly as intentional about talking to God as I am about a multitude of other things in my life. It stings even more when I realize that, more often than not, He’s the one who’s hearing the busy signal, not me.

James also tells us that when we do ask, we don’t recieve because our requests are generated by selfishness, so that we can spend things on our own pleasures (James 4:3). It’s not necessarily wrong to ask for things that we want, but if my prayer life sounds like gimme, gimme, gimme because it’s all about me, me, me, then James tells me I shouldn’t be surprised when all I hear is beep, beep, beep. Many people treat James 4 as a hodgepodge of random thoughts, but I think the conversation about not being friends with the world, humbling ourselves, submitting to God and not being double-minded are actually intended to reinforce this idea that I am not number one, that I don’t get to dictate the agenda, and that simply me wanting something does not justify me having it. Listen to yourself the next time you pray, and evaluate just how selfish, arrogant, and presumptive you sound.

As for how we avoid the busy signals, I think the three passages I quoted earlier give us a good place to start.

In Psalm 34, David establishes that God wants to answer prayer: “His ears are open to their cry.” Jesus said, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!” (Matthew 7:11) As obvious as this sounds, believing that God is good and that He wants to answer prayer is essential to not getting a busy signal. It’s not that God says, “If you don’t believe I’m good, I’m not going to be good to you,” because He is indiscriminantly good (Matthew 5:45). Being convinced He is good is important because it affects how you perceive His response. If your idea of what good is isn’t aligned with His, He may be speaking to you clearly but all you’re going to hear is Charlie Brown’s teacher.

Psalm 34 was written after David had fled to the Philistines because living with his mortal enemies was safer than trying to hide in the wilderness from King Saul. Let that sink in for a minute. Saul was pursuing him so fervently that he felt safer in Goliath’s hometown. Of course, the only way a person would do something like that was if he weren’t in his right mind, so he feigned insanity before the king of Gath, which scared the king, causing him to send David away. If there was anyone who had a right to feel lonely and abbandoned, it was David. And yet, Psalm 34 doesn’t read like that, does it? In fact, it’s the exact opposite. If you continue reading 1 Samuel after he leaves Gath, on multiple occasions David seeks the Lord through the priest Ahimelech, and the Lord gives him very specific guidance. No static, no busy signal — just simple, clear communication. I’m convinced the attitudes David expressed in Psalm 34 were a foundational component of enabling those conversations.

If we want God to hear us, we have to listen to Him.

The essence of 1 John 5:14-15 is that if we want God to hear us, we have to listen to Him. According to these verses, if we ask for anything according to God’s will, He hears us; and if He hears us, He gives us what we asked for. That means, that if we don’t receive what we asked for, He didn’t hear us — not because He’s rude, insensitive, or mean, but because it wasn’t part of His will, which, as David just taught us, is good.

An interesting side effect of analog telephone switch design was that if both callers were on the line and picked up at the same time, they could sometimes hear each other faintly under or between the beeps. This phenomenon was known as “talking over the busy signal” and was possible because the busy signal was just a tone sent down the line — it wasn’t a true disconnection. Similarly, when God doesn’t give us what we ask for, He isn’t cutting us off or ignoring us, He’s giving us feedback, talking to us over the busy signal, if you will, guiding us in the direction of His will so that we will ask for something that He can respond to positively.

The thing is, however, that we don’t pay attention to the negative answers. We’re convinced, like Harry Nilsson, that “no” is the saddest experience we’ll ever know, because we believe we know what’s good for us, and we couldn’t possibly be mistaken on that point. There are many things that the Bible tells us explicitly are God’s will, but the rest is dependent upon the most important skill in any relationship: listening.

I know we think we listen, but we don’t, and I can prove it. Jesus said in Matthew 6:7-8 that God isn’t impressed with empty repetition and lots of words, and then gives us template for us to follow in the next five verses. So what do we do? We take our Lord’s model prayer and turn it in into the most frequently and mindlessly repeated passage in the entire Bible — bar none. Even if you think you’re doing more than reciting the Lord’s Prayer, I challenge you to pay attention to how much your prayers are filled with empty repetition. Perhaps you are hearing God’s busy signal because He’s trying to talk over the mindless string of beep, beep, beep you’re sending His way, and you’re just not listening.

When was the last time you intentionally changed what you were praying for in response to not getting what you asked for in an attempt to align what you’re requesting with His will? Thomas Edison reported testing over 6,000 different materials to find the right filament for his light bulb. Never discouraged, he famously stated that he hadn’t failed 6,000 times, but had instead successfully eliminated that many incorrect answers. If a scientist can show that kind of dedication in pusuit of a technical problem, why do we either assume that God has blocked our number or refuse to change our approach when He says no? I’m not saying that everything you don’t get an immediate answer to is the wrong thing to ask for, because there are often other dynamics in play that we’re not aware of, but I do believe that we (which means me first) don’t spend nearly enough time listening in our prayer life. Fundamentally, I believe that prayer isn’t so much about us getting God to do what we want as it is about Him getting us to do what He wants, namely, to think and act and talk like Him.

Fundamentally, prayer isn’t about us getting God to do what we want, but about Him getting us to do what He wants, namely, to think and act and talk like Him.

I really believe that was at the core of what enabled Elijah to start and stop a 40-month drought like he was turning the spigot in God’s backyard on and off. Elijah’s story has always fascinated me, and he’s one of the guys I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with one of these days. Even though there’s no record of it in 1 Kings 17, and James makes it sound like the idea of a drought was Elijah’s idea, there’s no way you can convince me that he and God had not discussed the plan before he showed up in Ahab’s court with a disconnect notice in hand. There is absolutely no question whose power was actually responsible for holding back the rain or sending the deluge once it was over, and it wasn’t Elijah’s.

There is also no doubt as to what prompted the drought. 1 Kings 16:30 says that Ahab did more evil in the sight of the Lord than any of his predecessors, which is saying something, because those guys were a pretty nasty bunch. Then he went and married Jezebel, worshipped Baal, and built the Asherah (basically implementing religious prostitution as a part of worship). He did this so flippantly that it made the evil the kings before him had done seem trivial. 1 Kings 16:31 would be comical if it weren’t so horrifically tragic. On top of that, we find out later that Jezebel made Ahab look like a chump when it came to doing evil. Given how far Elijah ran away after the showdown on Mt. Carmel, it’s pretty clear he wasn’t the type to go pick a fight with the likes of Ahab and Jezebel of his own accord. The Bible doesn’t say it explicitly, but make no mistake: God initiated and orchestrated everything we read Elijah did in 1 Kings 17 and 18.

So why did Elijah say that it wasn’t going to rain until he said so? Why does James ascribe the beginning and the end of the drought to Elijah’s prayer?

The answer to those questions, which is given in the second half of James 5:16, takes a little effort to unpack. In the NASB it reads, “The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.” That rendering is both accurate and faithful to the original, but I feel it loses a lot of color in translation. The Greek word for “effective” is the word from which we get the English word “energy.” It’s active, dynamic, pulsating, and it very clearly and directly modifies “prayer” — not the “righteous man” doing the praying — which we will see is a key distinction.

It’s also worthwhile to note that “effective,” in Greek, is a participle in the present tense, indicating continuous action, and the middle voice, meaning that the thing it modifies, prayer, is both the agent and recipient of the action. In other words, it is another way of describing the same dynamic we just talked about in 1John. The energy prayer produces is caused by the energy it feeds itself. The continuous, active process of absorbing God’s Word, seeking His face, listening to His response, fine tuning requests and petitioning again and again and again is the energy that gives prayer its power, and that power is tremendous. The phrase translated “can accomplish much” comes first in James’ original sentence structure, giving it emphasis. Rendered literally, it reads, “Great power has the prayer of the righteous one which is continuously energizing itself.” The image that immediately comes to mind is the scene from Disney’s Alladin where Robin Williams iconically protrays the genie describing himself as “PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER … in an itty bitty living space.” James says that prayer is undeniably phenomenal cosmic power, and the itty bitty living space is the righteous one.

We know from multiple other passages that the righteous are the ones who have been justified by accepting the free gift of Jesus’ sacrifice for sins by faith; and those who recieve life by faith walk by faith. In my book, The Weight of the Wait, I discuss extensively the role faith plays in transforming us into the image of Christ, so all I will point out here is that, as that process produces Christlikeness in us, we necessarily become increasingly more aligned with His will. When we combine 1 John 5:14-15 with James 5:16, we begin to see it is that transformation which generates the power of prayer. As we become more in tune with God’s heart and mind, our petitions are more according to His will, which unleashes the power of God to a greater degree. It’s not that we make God more powerful or that we become more powerful ourselves but rather that our prayers become more effective and efficient conduits of God’s power as we become more like Him.

Elijah’s prayer was powerfully effective because He knew God.

Elijah’s prayer was powerfully effective, not because he had power, or because he exerted lots of energy praying for the rain to stop, but because he knew God. He knew God so intimately that they were in lock-step with one another. He knew God the way Moses did, who knew God so well he was able to change God’s mind. He knew God the way Enoch did, who knew God so well that he just went home with Him for dinner one evening and never came back.

One of these days, when I sit and have my chat with Elijah, I’m going to ask him whether he ever felt like he was getting a busy signal from God. I might have to explain to him what a telephone is first, but somehow I think he’ll understand what I mean. And then I’m going to ask him how he got to know God so well that he was able to calmly and confidently stop the rain and call down fire from heaven on Mt. Carmel. That’s going to be a fascinating conversation, but I think I already know what he’s going to say: believe in the goodness of God, ask in faith, and listen obediently. Easy peasy. No more busy signal.