In his book Directions, author James Hamilton shares this insight about LISTENING TO GOD:

Before refrigerators, people used icehouses to preserve their food. Icehouses had thick walls, no windows and a tightly fitted door. In winter, when streams and lakes were frozen, large blocks of ice were cut, hauled to the icehouses and covered with sawdust. Often the ice would last well into the summer.

One man lost a valuable watch while working in an icehouse. He searched diligently for it, carefully raking through the sawdust, but didn't find it. His fellow workers also looked, but their efforts, too, proved futile. A small boy who heard about the fruitless search slipped into the icehouse during the noon hour and soon emerged with the watch.

Amazed, the men asked him how he found it.

"I closed the door," the boy replied, "lay down in the sawdust, and kept very still. Soon I heard the watch ticking."

Light & Life Magazine asks:

Have you heard about the cell phone ringtone that junior high and high school kids are using to keep teachers from discovering that they are using their cell phones in school? The pitch of this ringtone, called the "mosquito tone," is too high for people over 25 to hear. So the kids can still send and receive text messages during class without the teacher knowing.

The mosquito tone was first developed in Great Britain to irritate teenagers who were loitering around convenience stores and keeping customers away by their loud and obnoxious behavior…Some kid simply figured out how to use that sound as his cell phone's ringtone and—voilà—kids are downloading it by the millions.

* Follow the "Link to Source" above for a full Wikipedia article and an audio recording. It might be entertaining to play it and see how many in your congregation can hear the sound. It will add to the illustration when only the youth can hear it.

In the movie The Island, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) lives in an isolated compound where the residents are told they are the survivors of a worldwide catastrophe, and that their only hope of life outside the compound is to win a lottery to go to the only place on Earth not contaminated by the deadly pathogen--"the island." 

The truth is, Lincoln Six Echo and all of the other so-called survivors are actually clones waiting to be used as spare parts by wealthy sponsors on the outside.  A trip to the Island is really a death sentence.

But Lincoln manages to escape and discovers a world he didn't know existed.  In one conversation someone mentions GOD, a concept with which Lincoln was completely unfamiliar.  "What's 'GOD'?" Lincoln Six Echo asks.

"Well," comes the reply, "you know, when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? GOD's the guy who ignores you."