He Learned All Six By Listening
The word for Monday, August 31, 2026 is He Learned All Six By Listening.
The anchor verses are 1 Peter 1:8 and Jeremiah 31:3.
There is a musician in Charlotte, North Carolina named Angel Paez who plays six instruments.
He taught himself every one of them by ear. He was born blind.
It started when he was small, sitting in church. He remembers hearing all those different instruments and wondering what they looked like, what they felt like, and how somebody made those sounds.
The piano came first. Then the accordion. Then the violin.
Nobody could hand him a page and expect the page to do the work. He learned where a note lived by hearing it, finding it, missing it, and finding it again. The instrument became known through touch and sound long before sight could have told him anything about it.
He kept listening. Over time he learned six instruments without formal instruction, working from the sound until his own hands could make it.
His family entered him in a local Spanish-language radio contest. He won. He later performed at the White House and has twice been nominated for Musician of the Year and Best Fiddler of the Year by the Carolina Country Music Awards.
His blindness belongs to his life. It does not exist for us to turn into a lesson about overcoming a shortage. Paez is a working musician, and listening is one of the ways he knows his craft.
He knows exactly what a violin is.
He has never seen one.
About eighteen hundred years ago, Irenaeus of Lyon spent page after page arguing against teachers who said the true GOD was too remote and hidden for ordinary people to know.
His answer was plain.
GOD is invisible. GOD is not unknown.
Irenaeus said the works of GOD declare HIM. Creation reveals the One who formed it. The thing made points toward the Maker.
Seeing and knowing are not the same act.
That distinction mattered in Irenaeus’s argument. The teachers he opposed built whole systems around a GOD beyond reach, with layers between the Creator and ordinary life. Irenaeus kept pointing back to the world in front of them and to Christ. The unseen GOD had not left people with nothing.
Scripture says plainly that no one has seen GOD. Irenaeus did not treat that as a problem to solve. He argued that the invisible GOD has made HIMSELF known through what HE has done and, above all, through the Son.
Peter says something similar to believers scattered across Asia Minor who had not seen Christ.
Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.
Peter had seen HIM. He had eaten with HIM, denied HIM, and been restored by HIM.
The people receiving the letter had not. They had a testimony, a gospel handed to them, and lives being reordered around Someone their eyes had never taken in.
Peter does not make their faith second-rate. He says the loving is happening now. The rejoicing is happening now. They know the One they have not seen.
That matters when GOD seems hidden.
There are stretches when prayer feels like speaking into a ceiling. No warmth. No clear answer. Nothing you could hold up as proof that GOD is near.
Silence can feel like absence. They are not the same thing.
Jeremiah speaks to a people living with displacement and loss, people who had every reason to wonder whether GOD had let them go.
Then comes this.
Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.
The Hebrew word translated drawn can carry the sense of drawing something toward you, and it can also mean extending or continuing something over time. Some translations lean toward drawn. Others hear the sense of continued or extended. That difference is worth respecting instead of forcing the word into one picture. What does not change is the subject of the sentence. GOD's everlasting love is still reaching toward a people who feel far away.
The movement belongs to GOD.
HE loves. HE draws. HE continues HIS lovingkindness.
None of it depends on Israel being able to feel HIM doing it.
That may be the word for somebody this morning. You have been treating the absence of a feeling as evidence of the absence of GOD. Peter will not let you do that. Jeremiah will not let you do it either.
Paez sat in a church as a small boy and listened closely to something he could not see. The sound was enough to begin learning what was there.
Faith does not ask you to pretend you can see what you cannot. It does not call uncertainty sight. It teaches you to listen for the One who has already made HIMSELF known, and to let what HE has done carry more weight than what you happen to feel this morning.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who has never had a moment you could point to and believes that disqualifies you.
- 🙏 To the one praying into a ceiling this morning.
- 🙏 To the one whose ability is being treated as a deficiency.
- 🙏 To the one who cannot feel GOD near and keeps listening.
Grace and Peace.