For a very long while now, I have struggled with hearing the voice of God, OR SO I THOUGHT…
A few nights ago, my squad had a session on the roof in which we were asked to draw or paint, just create something, as a form of worship. Now, the Lord knows just as well as I do, that He did not place in me a particular knack for art such as drawing and painting. So I decided to approach the “art” worship session a little differently by just writing in my journal.
I know that the Lord speaks to me in so many ways, but the thing is that I never actually realize He is speaking to me WHILE it is happening. It’s always afterwards that I think, “oh yeah, that was a God thing.” He gave us the Word, that’s how He “speaks” to us, but you have to go looking for the right thing. I thought I was really not worth individual, special attention from the Creator of the universe. it just seemed illogical to me. I have felt and experienced the Holy Spirit, through worship and scripture, but I never expected individual conversation.
But this super cool thing happened on the roof of our hostel during worship that night. I was writing a prayer in my journal, just telling the Lord about all of my doubts and fears and frustrations and insecurities that have surfaced since being on the race and then all of the sudden I just stopped writing about the prominent negatives happening in me and started writing these random things about myself. The kinds of things I would literally never think or say about myself. It sounded like MY voice in my head, but I knew that I don’t talk like that, those weren’t the words I would use or the things I would say or think about myself. It was, however, the kinds of things the Lord would say about me.
Through writing in my journal:
He told me I am brave and bold. He told me I am wise. He told me I am creative. He told me I am valued and wanted and worthy.
Hearing other people say this type of thing used to make me think “yeah, sure that happened” not actually fully grasping or even believing it, but it is just such an indescribable experience. And I kind of like that it’s hard for other people to understand my personal encounter with the Holy Spirit. Like it’s this thing that is totally mine and totally His, together, that no one else can completely understand.
I have struggled for so long. Trying so hard to hear the voice of the Lord, fighting with Him, asking Him why He didn’t speak to me and why I couldn’t hear Him and why other people could and what I was doing wrong, that I wasn’t even noticing that He was all around me, just waiting for me to shutup and actually notice. I have been learning that hearing the voice of the Lord is kind of a choice. I don’t think you can ever be 100% certain that the Lord is speaking to you, because it is not some big audible booming voice. The heavens do not open up, there are no trumpets blaring or choir singing. It is just a “well this looks a lot like God and it lines up with what I know about His character and what I have read in scripture”. And I have just been ignoring that little tid bit of information because it kind of terrifies me. I don’t want to make my life decisions on a “best guess”. I want certainty. I want to know beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the Lord himself is speaking directly to me about a specific thing at a specific time. But that is just not how it works. And I believe that the Lord designed it that way for a purpose. You know how when you read the Bible, and the passage that you’re reading tells you one thing and you have this great connection with the Lord and the truth He just revealed to you, and then you look back at it later and you have a totally new perspective and you see it in a totally different way than you did before. I think that is kind of how the Lord speaks to us. He gives us one thing, and then allows us to look back at it later and get a totally different truth about a totally different situation, even though it is the exact same story and the exact same words.
the Lord reminded me ever so sweetly, of a quote my pastor shared one Sunday at church:
“Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, and we see it maybe frequently, God shows Himself everywhere, in everything–in people and in things, and in nature and in events. It becomes everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.”
He is literally in EVERYTHING, including me. Every single good and perfect thing I could ever think or imagine. It’s Him. He is ALWAYS speaking to me, and you for that matter, in every circumstance, in every situation, we just need to have the eyes to see it.
