Sandra and I have a new addition to our family, a 6-week-old Boxer puppy named Billybob Re-Pete.  Like all 6-week-old puppies, Billybob is high maintenance.  He seems to sleep when I need to be awake, and is awake when I need to sleep.  We've also learned that as soon as he awakens, he needs to go outside, or things can get messy.  So he sleeps in a box next to our bed, and when he awakens, his struggle to get out of the box awakens either Sandra or I and we take him out.   

We might simply leave him outside, but he has already fallen into our pond once, and had we not been there to rescue him, he would have drowned.  Since we can't leave him in the back yard alone until he's a little larger, I've been bringing him to the office with me each morning.  Yesterday as I was studying, he sat beside my chair, looked up at me and began to whine.  I glanced at him and continued with my study.  He continued to whine.  Finally, I picked him up and said "Billybob, I hear you."  I scratched him behind the ears, and within 10 seconds, he was asleep.  I laid him on his pad beside my desk, and he slept for the next two hours. 

This made me think how similar this is to our crying out to God.  We know that He is there, we know that He can hear, yet somehow we start to doubt whether He is listening, or maybe we doubt whether He cares.  We just want some kind of a sign that he is listening.  I need him to scratch me behind the ears and say, "Jack, I hear you."  When the Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign, he told them that the only sign they would receive was the sign of the prophet Jonah. 

Matthew 12 (NIV)
⁴⁰For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.