St. Philip's Newsletter

How can I know when it is God who is speaking to me?

When I was growing up, people around me received messages from God. Then these holy savants would tell everybody. Some heard deep booming voices, as if God were calling from inside a hole. Others saw what I imagined as a huge billboard, flashing with lights like a Broadway marquee: "You've seen the Lord. Go forth and brag about it." In smaller print beneath the headlines: "For the Jesus hotline dial 4-h-e-a-v-e-n." Others heard celestial music and claimed to have seen Jesus hovering over them like a Blackhawk helicopter, perhaps calling, "Join Jesus' army today!" These vision-seeing, voice-hearing people quickly informed me that unless I was experiencing similar phenomena, I was not a Christian. If God had not swooped down and yelled for me— like the announcer on the Price is Right, "This is God. Come on down!"—then I could not call myself one of them, a Christian.

I wanted to hear God speak to me. I wanted to say with certainty, the certainty of seeing visions and hearing voices, that I was a Christian. I imagined God in a game of chase, tagging me as one of them, a Christian. But the fact is I didn't see flashing lights, I didn't hear deep baritone voices, and I didn't see a flying Jesus.

I figured that I did something bad, something wrong, not to be seeing things. I tried hanging at home more; maybe He had been calling while I was out. I said extra prayers in case there was a prayer quota to meet before you were let in. I gave extra in the offering plate, hoping my generosity would speed up the process. I even dragged myself to a tent revival, but I couldn't go down the aisle to the screaming, baptizing evangelist because I wasn't seeing lights or hearing voices or feeling the spirit. I stopped listening for God's call and stopped waiting for a flying Jesus.

Instead of a holy transmission over some intergalactic PA system or that flying Jesus calling out to me in a stopped moment of time, I finally heard God's call swell up from a forgotten place, inside me. After all the waiting and wanting, the voice that called was my voice, soft and weak, crackly and unsure, hesitant and afraid. I knew this forgotten voice was indeed God's because it rose above the noise around me—the noise of our culture's dos and don'ts and shoulds, the noise of my making plans and controlling situations, the noise of others saying who was Christian and who was not.

In a moment that resolved all past confusion and discouragement, I realized that this voice, God, had been having a conversation with me all along, like Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz having on those red shoes, all along. Because I was focused on the call coming in a Hollywoodesque way, on wanting to know when it would happen, on thinking with my head instead of my heart, on getting what I wanted when I wanted it, I couldn't hear God's voice deep inside of me, all along.

Hearing God's voice was like being beaten up in a back alley. I fell into a dark empty place wrought with hangovers and unsoothable sadness, out-of-control anger and tears, mixed-up thoughts, lost smiles and forgotten happiness. This stormy place laid bare in me the raw understanding that I would need help to resurrect myself, to find me. The journey of learning to recognize God's voice was exhausting, and confusing, and humiliating, maddening, frustrating, and embarrassing. I didn't have time for these problems. This detour was not part of my plan, my carefully scripted scheme.

This dark disturbing experience stripped away the deafening noises dampening His voice in me. By giving up my plan, my answers, my timetable, my agenda, I was able to create enough space in my thick, hurting head to remember that I am a child of God. I was tagged by God when I was born. God's visions and God's voices came into being with me, as part of me. My back alley mugging allowed me to stop living my plan; to listen and to hear; to see the present; to live this day.

I knew that it was God speaking to me because I could hear myself call back and my spirit became light. Years of heaviness were lifted from me. The burdens of doing the right thing, of being chosen, of forcing my way down a path ceased, and I was stilled. A new yet wobbly courage started to live in me, and I became comfortable in my own skin, in my own circumstances. I felt safe and certain and grateful. Nothing around me had changed, but everything was different.

I knew that it was God's voice speaking to me because I could smile again.

--Jamie