Learning to Hear God

I am in potentially one of the biggest struggles of my life. My hope in sharing this blog is not only to be vulnerable and honest with those of you who have chosen to support me in this time, but also to hopefully overcome this struggle and share what I learn with you.

This blog is also a preface for this weekend.

First I’ll build some framework for you to hang this idea on. God speaks to each of us in different ways, and I’m fighting to understand how he speaks to me with the intention of using this to ask him to guide the next steps of my life, which could potentially be some of the biggest decisions I’ve ever made.

To some, God speaks through his scriptures. Meaning that his Holy Spirit is with you as you read and he points out and identifies the verses you need and extracts the meanings and applications that you need at the right time.

For some, he speaks in visions and dreams. He’ll show pictures or mini-movies that are either very clear, “I saw you getting married” or metaphorical “I see you picking up a stone that no-one else can pick up” and they are to be interpreted by the Holy Spirit as a message from God.

For some, he speaks through others or patterns. These can be seeing the same story in multiple places, the same number, a color, a theme, and those will draw your attention to something God wants you to see or do. One of my dearest friends says that if you ever hear the same suggestion from many different people (and it’s unprompted, and those people aren’t part of a regular discussion) then God is probably trying to use them as a messenger.

And then there are the people who hold that which I envy intensely. Direct communication with God. As it were, there are people who hear the “still small” voice of God in their head, or in some cases it’s a little louder, but regardless these are the people who can have full conversations with God, and this is what I want so very badly.

To be honest, I’ve been praying for this sort of thing since month ten of my race, when I was in Cambodia. And I’ve been praying earnestly. And angrily. To the point where I have headaches and I fall asleep on the floor because I’ve been waiting so long. To some extent, I have suspicions as to why I don’t hear God’s voice (except through scripture and people/patterns) and those could be sin, an unwillingness to listen, or a lack of belief that he’ll show up when I ask, but there are also scriptures that say that all we need to do is ask, and it shall be given, that if we seek, search, and knock, we will find him. 

I’m wholly frustrated by this, because I feel like I’m seeking, and I don’t hear anything.

I wouldn’t label myself as a spiritual person. I haven’t seen any healings or exorcisms or spoken in tongues or felt the spirit move in radical ways (though I believe those things are 100% possible). This is a huge challenge for me. I see the scriptures talk of demons and possessions and miracles and amazing things that I have not seen. 

So I have a choice. I have the choice to believe and have faith in what I hear and what I read, or I can dismiss it, and effectively condemn myself to a form of spiritual death that does not allow God to move in his fullest capacity.

Sound bad? Yeah. Sounds bad. I don’t want to do that. But wow, this is hard.

So my challenge this weekend is this: one of my roommates is going to drop me off in a nearby town with only a bible and I’m going to pray my way back. The idea of this is to give God an opportunity to work in my life in a supernatural way.

I’ll let you know how it goes 🙂