As God Makes Us: Trusting His Voice
“God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing
It’s a slow afternoon in late summer, each delicious minute begging me to listen to the quiet shifting sounds around me. Hunched over my cracked laptop, I stretch, and look up, fascinated by the way the wind sounds like the sea rolling in and out, the leaves like waves caressing the shoreline and splashing back in glee, lifting and falling again with a hushed acceptance, like a tipped rainstick. The birds slow their song to hum along. The squirrels pause their scurrying to pay attention to this quiet, wordless prayer.
This is what it sounds like to be alive in my body today, the wind holding God’s generous message: to cling to what is good, to cease worry, to simply be, rooting down right where I am, a whispered reassurance of place and purpose.
What emotions rise in you as you read this today?
Does your heart quicken at the thought of listening, or do you—like me—panic as you read of God’s voice in other people's lives because you don’t hear God that way, or perhaps can’t even recall the last time you heard God speak?
One icy winter morning in my junior year of college, my roommate swept into our tiny bathroom, practically bursting at the seams as she recounted an extremely detailed (and terrifying) dream from the night before—one in a series of similar dreams. She knew God was speaking to her about her future, and providing healing for her past. Later that same month, another roommate spoke to me about visions God placed in her mind, drawing her overseas to work and minister alongside the Irish church, which would later come to fruition.
At my Christian college, friends recounting God’s audible, visual, or tangible voice was common. However, instead of supporting these friends in their breakthroughs, I was terrified, deeply anxious. I’d never (and have never) heard from God these ways; I feared that because I couldn’t share in their experiences, I was inept at hearing God.
Insidious questions haunted me: How will I know what to do if I cannot hear God? Am I forgotten? Is it my fault?
After much reflection and conversation, I discovered that maybe I felt God was silent because I was not listening for God, but instead for an identical copy of someone else’s experience of God. As the voice of comparison shouted inside me—why doesn’t God love me like that?—I couldn’t hear the voice calling to me in the quiet depths of myself.
Over time, I’ve realized that we will never hear God’s voice in the same way as someone else does, because, as poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes, God speaks to each of us as he makes us. Our intentional God knows every messy bit of our story more intimately than anyone ever has or will, lovingly familiar with our differences in the way we work, play, speak, and listen.
In the same way there are various learning styles, or love languages, God connects with us in the way we personally feel known. In the stories of the Bible, God interacts with his people in a wide variety of ways, from visions and miracles, to angels and still, small voices. We aren’t created identically, but are created with an identical, abundant love. As God creates a good work in us, God speaks with that same intentional care, ensuring we are fully seen, known and loved.
My pastor once said, “When we are learning to hear the Lord’s voice, we must remember we worship a God of initiation.” God leans into our ordinary moments, enters our fleshy story, “steps into time, and tells us what’s true,” gently inviting us into a new way forward, together. In order to grow closer to Jesus, we have to trust that voice inside our own hearts. We have to leave the thief of comparison by the roadside before he steals our joy, leaving us unable to rejoice in the good work God is doing around and within us.
Friends, this is hard work. Although I have, with much reflection, come to recognize ways God speaks to me, I still wish God would write me a note and leave it in my mailbox. Despite the way my journey has looked quite different from others’, despite the worries that flutter around my chest, I know that God is speaking to me as God made me, if I can learn to quiet the voice of comparison and listen to the loving voice inviting me into abundant life.
We are not alone. God is speaking in the cracks and spaces of our specific stories, knowing how we hear him best. Today, may we reach for God’s outstretched hand, lean in, and listen.
