Ears.

Yesterday I sat at Fido with a friend and we discussed hearing the voice of God.

[For you Nash-people, I am fully aware that I am nowhere near cool enough to frequent Fido. But my friend is definitely cool enough to be there, so they didn’t ask me to leave.]

We talked about how challenging it is to hear God sometimes, how (honestly) unsure it can be, and how working out our salvation isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

She said something to this effect, so I’m going to paraphrase instead of quote:

Hearing the voice of God and living out of that reality is like flirting in public- everyone sees it and knows that it’s going to go one of two ways- you either succeed or fail.

[Sometimes when my non-writer friends say profound things like this, it makes me realize that everyone could do my job.]

The reality is, you either have heard the Lord correctly or you haven’t.  For example, though this has never happened to me of course, sometimes a person [let’s call her Shmannie] think the Lord has shown her who she is going to marry.  And then two years later Shmannie sits at the wedding of that exact person, laughing in her head and weeping in her heart just a little bit.

Not because of the marriage, but because it is scary to think that you can’t hear God.  Or that you heard God wrong.  And it brings so many fears and questions to the surface.

And there is no resolution to this- I think that this is exactly what “working our salvation out” looks like.  At least it does for me.

The truth is that flirting in public is really scary because you have no idea how the other person really feels about you.  In contrast, when we are trying to hear God, we already know how He feels about us, so some of the internal pressure is gone.  But it’s that external pressure, all the eyes and ears who watch you try to live according to what you’ve heard, that make failure a scary reality.  The ones who make you feel like if you flirt in public and don’t get a date, the issue is you and your flirty-skillz.

Somehow these words deserve to be in this post, but I don’t know where or how: Brave. Grace. Risk. Worth it. Complicated. Love. Simple.

So I have no clean ending to this one- it really is just me trying to think through how to help a couple of my friends who want to hear God desperately but maybe aren’t having the easiest of times with it right now.  I know God’s heart for them, I know that He doesn’t make it hard to know Him, I know that He wants us to hear Him FAR more than we want to hear Him.  So I’m praying and asking Him to make these verses true in the lives of the people who have open ears.

Jeremiah 33:3

‘Call to Me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.

Isaiah 30:21

Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

Your thoughts?  What do you tell someone who is struggling to hear God?

I’m all ears.  🙂

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