The Voice of God

            Hearing the voice of God is a very personal thing.  There are two sides to communication with God: universal –God commands all men everywhere to repent, etc.;  personal –the Spirit writes God on our hearts and we become a law to ourselves, so that we do the things of God without being instructed.  Both arguments are valid.  Some of what I feel about the voice of God is personal and from my own personal experience with God.  Some of what I believe is directly taught by scripture.  I believe that my personal belief does not in any way discount or disrespect the universal nature of scripture.

            There are those who have called me a ‘prophet’, some sarcastically or hatefully as though to indicate I think I am and I’m definitely not, and some who seriously believe God has an active, current word to others through me.  Let me say right off that I do not consider myself to be a prophet.  Generally those things I share in a public venue were not spoken for others, but for my own understanding or correction and I write them down and then share them because of the impact they bring to my own soul and spirit.  I do not think I am the last word or the only voice.  I am one voice and I recognize that God is greater and more vast than all of us or any of us.

            I can count on my fingers the incidents during my 48 years as a Christian when God gave me a direct word for a specific person.  Those occasions were not because I am or was the local prophet, but because I was there.  Perhaps having someone who isn’t a prophet deliver the message, makes it easier to take and use.  Perhaps it increases an awareness that God cares enough about your situation to use an inferior voice if need be to bring you his message of love and redemption.  Perhaps the non-prophet is just more approachable.  But it is not my regular job in the kingdom of God.

            That said, I do hear the voice of God often.   I knew the difference between my daddy’s voice and my brother-in-law’s voice.  I knew the difference between my instructor’s voice and my fellow student’s voice.  I knew the difference between my superintendent’s voice and my colleague’s voice.  I know the difference between the voice of God and other voices.  That doesn’t make me anything special.  If you tell me you’ve never heard his voice, I will have no comment on that pro or con.  I will have no critical statement for you.  That is a personal thing.  But don’t tell me I have not heard the voice of God.  You do not have that right.  And with that in tow, I will give my opinion of how God speaks to man.

            As a child, I heard the voice of God often in quiet times speaking my name.  It didn’t sound like Charlton Hesston or James Earl Jones.  It didn’t echo or reverberate.  I still hear him speak my name sometimes –usually when I’m not paying attention or listening for an answer or reading my Bible in time of need.  Sometimes it is spoken in a corrective tone; sometimes it is soft and kind.  As a child I was riddled with fear and inadequacy and I felt I could not come to God.  I believe that is why he spoke my name often as he did, so that when I was almost 19 years of age, I would understand who it was that was speaking to me and through my searching I would know his voice and finally follow.

            People have asked me if it is audible –often as a precursor to an argument.  I will say that sometimes it really seems that way, though the tree seems to have fallen in the forest when no one is there to listen –except me.  But in those incidents it has not come from within, it gets my attention, and no one else is present to accredit it to.  Therefore, I believe in some cases it is audible.  Often it is not.  Often it interrupts my thoughts with a command or caution.  Sometimes it enters my spirit without going through my mind and comes out so full and finished that I know it was not the product of my thinking.  Let me interject here that in the writing of it, my own thinking often clouds the word I heard or finishes the sentence that was left incomplete.  Sometimes I honestly have to back up and take out the ‘me’ that I recognize in it.  But sometimes, God gives me his blessing to write from my mind about what he is teaching me without reproof, knowing that I only understand my own language.

            That brings up another question I have been asked. “So you think God speaks English –specifically American English.”  My answer is “Yes. And French and Spanish and Chinese and Choctaw and Portuguese and all the dialects of the earth and all of their variations.”  Let me venture into some cloudy landscape here with a concept that I am only discoving.

            After God created man and breathed into him the breath of life, man and God conversed very well.  Man was still man and God was God, but they were conversant for many centuries.  Then Nimrod began ruling the men of the earth.  He was ‘all that’ and began building a city for his name and for the name of mankind, a city that would bind them to each other, with a tower that would reach into the heavens and be visible from everywhere so that they would not be scattered, they would never get lost.  Genesis 10 and 11

            God did not approve and he reached down with a swift motion and changed their language.  Suddenly they had a barrier that had no precedent and they scattered as they were told to do after the flood.  The great tower was never finished and nations were born into misunderstanding.  God’s language did not change but he knew the individual languages he created on that day.  I don’t believe any man was left with the ability to speak the language of God.  It is my opinion.  And yet, I believe he spoke their languages.

            So when he speaks to me, he doesn’t speak in French, or Chinese or Russian.  He speaks American English and not the old English of the King James Bible.  He speaks with no foreign accent.  If he had a purpose in doing that, he would, but as yet, he does not.  The one problem that frequently arises is that of linguistics.  My belief is that the language of God is far more simple and yet more complex than any of mankind’s languages. 

            Years ago, my husband and I went to France and spent one day in Versailles.  When we first arrived at the palace it was so vast that it became apparent we could not see it all in one day.  We had to make choices.  They offered us tour guides in our various languages and also the rental of headphones that would interpret what we were seeing in our own language.  We rented one set of headphones and joined a tour group led by an English speaking man of mid-eastern decent.  It became apparent that neither of us could understand our English speaking guide and so I gave my husband the headphones and struck off on my own.

            In my first college go round, I took a good bit of Spanish and I found a Spanish speaking tour guide.  It was amazing how much the language came back to me as I listened to her speak.  She was informative and entertaining and by the time we had finished the main tour, I had gained much information about the French monarchy and history and had new insights about the art.  Did I understand every word she spoke.  Oh my, no.  It had been way too long since I had conversed in Spanish.  But I got the gist of what she was saying.  I got the idea of her talk and I learned a lot.  I even understood some of her jokes!

            When God speaks, there is no way to understand all he wishes to tell us for our words are far too inferior.  But we listen and we catch the basic meaning, the main information.  Then because he cares that we understand, his spoken word is reinforced by his creation.  Life, weather, and even the stars teach us things that our words can barely explain.  And it is cemented by his revealed written word to keep us on track.  Jesus told his disciples that he had much to teach them that they didn’t have time for nor could they understand if they had time.  But he promised them His Spirit who would lead them into all truth.

            Now I shall address my first reaction when God told me he wanted me to listen and obey him and not another:  “How can I know it is you and not my own mind?”  Beyond an answer that was customized specifically to my experience and understanding, he also told me to ask for wisdom (reinforced by scripture in Proverbs and James) and understanding (reinforced by scripture often from Psalms to Colossians) and to ask him to show me through his creation.  But when we ask for Wisdom, we are cautioned to accept his voice, his wisdom without doubt and vacillating.  How can we receive anything from him if we always submit it to human terms?  

            He has also told me that some things will be proven in the obeying.  Jesus said “My sheep know my voice and they follow.  The voice of another they will not follow.”

            I do hear the voice of my God.  I learned by hearing it again and again and not explaining it away.  I have learned by the shame of refusing to obey and the frustration of doubt when his words seemed impossible to accept.  His love for me took time to show me his faithfulness even when I was not faithful and teach me his goodness when I was not good.  Often his voice gets my attention so he can teach me through scripture or life or the words of another.  Sometimes it teaches me from the inside out.

            For me, the voice of my God is as diverse and complex as he is.  He will not be categorized or filed away or boxed in to my neat little theology.  The most amazing thing about his voice is that he continues to speak to one like me.

            In conclusion I believe he wants to be heard.  He wants to be followed.  Ask to hear and then attune your heart to listen without questioning everything you hear.  He cares enough about his children to make sure you are not led astray when you are listening.

Reciprocation

“Give and it shall be given to you: pressed down, shaken together and running over.”  It’s a principle in scripture  I will pair it with a comment from my husband made in the mid 90s when I was struggling with some issues in my teaching career.  His comment was “At the end of the day, at the end of the year, what do you need to have accomplished; what do you have to walk away with?”

It’s hard to really consider that life is reciprocal.  Several years ago the Newsboys recorded a song with the line “The good I do goes nowhere.  The bad just seizes the day.”  While I identify with the song strongly on its premise that we concentrate on sin instead of love and grace as we should, that one line –though it reflects how we often feel, kind of sidetracks me.  On a post about a negative episode in a friend’s life, another friend commented ‘Karma, lol.’  The friend wasn’t really being mean, but it made me think about the way we interpret life.

When things are going great, we seldom consider reciprocation as a cause.  Yet when we read the verse above, we seldom consider negative actions or reactions as an outcome.  We concentrate on the future that will be bright if we are kind and giving and the ‘we’ is usually ‘you guys out there.’ 

A contact recently informed me how utterly despicable I am and basically that I’m going to get mine from God eventually and from that person in the present.  I won’t say I didn’t consider or pray about the accusation, but in the end grace is grace or it isn’t.  Forgiveness doesn’t exist unless you participate.  Peace will belong to the peaceable. 

That said there is a principle of reciprocation in both good and bad things.  Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it to the person who is behaving himself while being battered and bludgeoned, but in Psalms, Jeremiah, and Hebrews we are told to wait for it; it’s coming.  None of us are without sin.  If we claim we are, the first letter of John says we are deceived. And so a daily cry for forgiveness is in order.  If we find ourselves committing the same sin over and over, then both a cry for forgiveness and a careful consideration of what’s bringing that about is in order.

A person in my past brought repeated injury to me in unconscionable ways with never a request for forgiveness.  One day I was instructed by God to forgive regardless.  Yet this person’s behaviors caused repercussions that injured again and again and each time a new result was uncovered and the anger came I would again ask for grace to forgive and be done with it.  Eventually I realized I would never be done with it so how could I forgive in reality.  Then the same Spirit that instructed me to forgive taught me that forgiveness doesn’t depend on a lack of pain to be true.

There are those who assert that if a person still feels pain, they have not forgiven.  Some things will always cause pain and perhaps the acknowledgement with out vengeance is part of the healing of the soul.  As grace was extended to me, I must be willing that grace be extended to others regardless and that comes back to me in surprising ways.

Reverse thinking is a mark of growing, intelligent development.  If you can deconstruct a problem or a situation you can often find solutions or understanding.  And so you begin an honest backward trek to see how you arrived at this point ill equipped or unprepared.  But seldom do we begin a backward trek to see how we came to success and peace, perhaps because we don’t feel the need to fix success and peace or to avoid it in the future.  Yet perhaps the analyzing of the good in our lives would be as productive if we practiced it.

If you are angry all the time and feel that everything has worked against you, looking backward –deconstructing – may help you to get a handle on it.  Reverse thinking won’t add to your present situation, mind you.  But it can help you see what choices and mindsets may have led you to this point and what you can avoid in the future.  This process should be introspective.  You can’t fix other people.

One factor often overlooked and ignored is what you brought to the table that should have been left behind.  What we give that should be given we expect to be reciprocated.  What we gave that we should not have given, we seldom expect to be reciprocated.  But as the song says “The bad just seizes the day.” Most of the time “I’m sorry’ is all you have to give at that point.  Often “I’m sorry” is not respected and seldom changes the outcome of events set in motion.  If the other person is able to receive it, “I’m sorry” makes a big difference to both hearts.  But until then, it is moot.  What saying “I’m sorry” does is within the heart of the person who speaks it, whether or not it was accepted.  If you can make amends, it is the godly thing to do.  But sometimes you cannot and the result must be left to grace.  Likewise, to continue expecting another person to pay for a wrong in the past is harming yourself again and again and not really harming the other person regardless of your need to bring them down. 

One of the reasons for this is that the past is truly past.  I cannot walk backward in time and change one action of my own or someone else.  I cannot even walk backward in time and come to a pure judgment of another’s action and motive.  As a child I suffered some unthinkable things, but I’ve learned that there is a warp in years that alters our perception of an evil event.  I’m not saying that no offense really occurred.  But I have learned that it is part of the past for a reason.

So how does the law of reciprocation work here?  What have those who injured me experienced?  Was it adequate payment for the ill I received?  I don’t know but I do know about the other statement.  I know what I must take from it, what I must end up with for life and soundness.  Some of the best actions were not the obvious response once I looked at that first year of teaching.  The same is true today of more weighty matters.

So my conclusion:  behave yourself.  Don’t forget to be kind.  Serve your God and your people the best you can, knowing you will make mistakes.  God forgives.  I must forgive.  Other people may not forgive.  Who I am depends on me before God, not on other people –except as they pray and spur me on to God.  Good deeds done right walk quietly and, most of the time, slowly in this world.  Evil shrieks. Be patient and keep your eyes on the path.  The rest will come.

Looking for treasures

At my second camp this year, I did a treasure hunt.  It was actually just a 4’ by 2’ box about 5 inches deep filled half full of sand and sprinkled with acrylic gems and various little treasures: small carved crosses and animals, drilled semi-precious stones, sea glass, small shells, pretty polished rocks, that sort of stuff. Once retrieved, the idea was to make it into a reminder of the camp and friendships and such. The kids really seamed to enjoy it and when we took it down, there was not a ‘treasure’ left in the sand box.

My time was so busy at camp –of course it was my own fault- that I didn’t really get to talk to them about the treasures as I planned.  But somehow, I think some of them got at least a little of what I intended: There are treasures all around us.  It is up to us to bring them into our lives and turn them into something important or to walk away and leave it behind.

Gifts of the Sea; Gifts of Time

(From my poems and processes page)

The water rolls across the sand

bringing treasures to my hand. 

The rhythmic flow will leave new gain

which only shortly will remain. 

My hand moves quickly to retrieve

the ones I see before they leave

and tumble back into the deep. 

But those I grab are mine to keep.

The minutes of my life move by

Exposing treasure to my eye

Laughter, friendship, creative tasks

Are here but moments and they pass.

I may choose to seize the chance

As time’s great waves recede, advance.

But if I leave treasure behind,

It’s gone, no longer to be mine.

And so the chance to love and help

A fitting word, a gift of self,

Sharing a meal, a listening ear,

A child’s dance, a neighbor’s tear.

Are strewn like jewels across time’s beach

The watchful heart need only reach.

But heedless, if we miss them here

On waves of time they disappear.

DW 2015

The above poem was finished after returning from North Carolina last week.  It’s been on my heart for awhile.

My granddaughter stays with me in the summer.  It’s a wild ride for sure.  My husband and I work in 2 camps and I maintain my studio for those who want summer classes.  She helps me make examples and books and generally opens up a bit more time for me to get it all done.  Yet this summer I became so aware that her presence here is a gift that is left in my view only a short time and then is sucked away.  Those moments will never reappear on my beach.  There will be others, but not the same.  This year I worked to try to set aside time for play and interaction that had nothing to do with ‘camp’.  It wasn’t an easy feat; I wasn’t always successful.  Sometimes I was gripey instead of fun.  Sometimes the ‘fun’ was contrived and rushed.  Yet I uncovered gems in the process and I hold them to my heart in memory.  I know I missed a lot of the best ones in the rush of waves of time and work.

Our trip to the cave, our visit to friends in Kentucky, our drive down to the beach and the sharing of life there, our time with our daughters and our son in law during the grueling process of a custody battle, all these are dropped on the beach by the waves of time.  We were very busy picking them up.  We missed other treasures, but the ones we have are precious.  It is a great warning and reminder to pick life up while you can.  You don’t know what it will drop at your feet or what it will jerk away never to be seen again.