Hearing God’s Voice

I’m doing it again, I thought. I was comparing my experiences with God to everyone else’s. Wondering what people meant when they said “God told me.” When I hear somebody say, “God told me” I wonder for a minute, “How? How did God tell you? Did you hear a voice? See a vision? Dream a dream?” I want to play the journalist, stop the clock, and conduct an interview right then and there. I want to ask a hundred questions about their personal experiences with hearing God’s voice. I want to develop a data-based consensus about how God talks. Which, I admit, seems rather pointless and entirely too time-consuming.

It’s a funny thing, though. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about God talking to people…how some people who love God deeply rarely claim to hear Him speak and others (who also love Him deeply) hear Him all the time, multiple times a day even. They confidently say so too, without an ounce of uncertainty, without a sliver of doubt.

I’ve realized that it is these people who perplex me the most. I usually examine that person (by some loosely self-contrived standard) and make an internal judgment call.  I’ll think, I’m sure God would talk to her. Or, I don’t think he would claim to hear God if he hadn’t. Sometimes, depending on what God has said, I’ll think: that doesn’t sound like something God would ever say, or are you sure that wasn’t the late night pizza talking?

Often when I hear a lot of God-told-me talk, my brain goes off on wild, unproductive tangents, examining the general concept of God communicating. Does God only speak to people from certain denominations who believe in such communication?  If someone doesn’t listen, how many times will God repeat Himself? In which language does God address someone if that person is bi-lingual? As if you could find a formula. As if God isn’t big enough to speak to his people in a million different ways. Through silence even.

It’s not as if I haven’t heard God speak myself. Often during my Scripture reading a pertinent truth or application will become clearer to me. I know it has been illuminated by the Holy Spirit. Throughout my day, I often hear sweet reminders that I know are God’s voice.  I promise I’ve got you. I’ve got your children. I am faithful.

Once when I was chaperoning a teen mission trip, I was watching my daughter, Grace, loving on a bunch of street children who lived in the sewers of Bolivia. Out of the blue, I heard an almost audible voice say, “Heidi, she doesn’t belong to you.”  I had no idea what that meant at the time, but I knew it was the Lord, and I knew He was saying that Grace belonged to Him, and to hold her loosely.  Fifteen years later, Grace is on the mission field. God was kind enough to confirm Grace’s calling to me years before it happened. Years before I felt the weight of missing her.

Over the last few years, I’ve been longing for that distinct of an encounter again. In airports and coffee shops, I’ve caught myself hoping for a complete stranger to walk up to me, full of the Holy Spirit, and say “God told me to tell you…“ I guess I’ve had a lot going on personally and I’ve longed to hear His voice explain things. Make things make sense. Isn’t that something we can all relate to? That deep need for every aspect of life to make complete sense? To line up in a neatly tied package?

When I bring this mental conflict to God in prayer I keep hearing: Why do you care? Why does it matter how I speak to others? Why do you compare my relationship with others to my relationship with you? (P.S. Believe me,  I understand the irony of hearing God’s voice while speculating about God’s voice).

  Those are exactly the right questions, aren’t they? The fact that I care and it takes up my headspace is telling me what I really believe about God and His character. It’s revealing what I really think about me and my place with Him. Underneath all the questions about how and why God speaks, underneath all my judgments about the validity of other people’s experiences with God, I have one basic fear: God loves and talks to others more than He loves and talks to me. The real problem I have with hearing other believers say “God told me” is that I start to wonder and feel insecure about whether or not they have a line to God that I don’t have. A connection with God that I’ve somehow lost.

The truth is I never had this obsession with God’s voice before my own struggles with the constant pain of fibromyalgia. Since then, I have questioned whether or not He really sees my suffering…whether he hears me crying out for relief. Sometimes I think “maybe He is tired of me praying the same prayer for healing over and over again.“ “Stop being a baby,” I imagine Him saying. “It’s not like you’re in the worst situation possible. Others in the world live with far worse.”

In my faulty thinking I sometimes am not listening for God’s voice, but instead putting words in God’s mouth. Words based on my own insecurities. Words based on my fears and anxieties. Words based on the American church’s constant mantra of Life with God is one blessing after another. One high mountain top experience after another. If you aren’t living that way, you’re doing something wrong. Words that He has never said.

I don’t mind admitting that I am sometimes uncertain about God’s voice. Sometimes I wrestle with how to know it is Him speaking versus my own inner dialogue. Sometimes I have an unrealistic and mistaken expectation of God and what He owes me in terms of communication. I feel impatient to know what’s ahead of me rather than resting in His presence and faithfulness.

  After many years of serving him, however, I do know one thing confidently. I do know how God doesn’t speak. He may speak to correct and guide me, but He doesn’t speak to shame or embarrass me. He doesn’t speak in riddles or hold a carrot stick in front of me so that He can have some masochistic joy watching me try to figure Him out.

God is for me and not against me. I am one of His children. God speaks love (Ephesians 5:1). He speaks life (Psalm 13:5). He speaks redemption (Luke 1:68). He speaks truth (John 16:13). 

May I rest in the confidence that I am known by Him and He wants to be known by me.