whom He loved standing nearby

Check out 1Sam3:10: "Then the LORD came and stood and called as at other times, 'Samuel! Samuel!' And Samuel said, 'Speak, for Your servant is listening.'"

In Ps23 when David proclaims "The Lord is my Shepherd" he is not merely being possessive. No, he is in fact proclaiming one of the great foundations of the faith: our personal relationship with Jesus Christ. God Almighty is not some distant deity that thunders from above. God is interested in an up-close and personal interaction with us. The incarnation of Christ is the obvious point-of-fact, but the Word is littered with such interactions.

And here in 1Sam3:10, we get such a picture. God can clearly project His voice into our mind and hearts, but He doesn't do that with Samuel. Instead, it says the Lord "came and stood and called." Rather than yell at Sam from the Heavens, rather than feeding Sam His voice into Sam's head as through a transmitter, the Lord came and stood in His room to speak to Him, like a friend visiting another friend. This matches Moses' experience with God, face-to-face, friend-to-friend. Sometimes I wonder whether the birth of the Messiah and His life on earth was a last resort, the only means of saving a broken world, or whether He came to earth simply because from Heaven, He missed us.