A woman named Mary Geegh lives in my town. Now in her nineties, she is bedridden in a nursing home. She wrote a wonderful little book called God Guides, telling of her experiences of hearing God’s voice during her long career as a missionary in India. I’ve read it many times. Her method, if one can call it that, was simple. When she needed to hear from the Lord about something—which was about every day—she would sit down with a pad and pencil, ask the Lord for his wisdom in the situation, listen quietly until he spoke, write down what she heard, and then do it.
Just like that.
If she didn’t hear anything, she wouldn’t do anything. Once when she was at odds with a fellow missionary and stumped over what to do to heal the breech, she listened for God’s wisdom and heard the Spirit say, “Give her an egg.” Perplexed, but obedient, she did what the Lord said to do, half apologizing to her colleague for what seemed to be a foolishly irrelevant act, given the tension between them. As it turned out, the gift of the egg had extraordinary significance for her alienated sister, since she needed exactly one more egg to feed her family that evening and had been wondering where she could find one. Mary’s act of obedience to what some call “the inner voice” showed her sister not only that she truly desired reconciliation but that God did too, powerfully so. To read her book is to read of a woman who had this kind of thing happen over and over again.
True, it’s a little odd the way she would almost routinely hear the voice of God. Or should I say, uncommon?
Most of us have not had her experience, but everyone I’ve known who has read of it has expressed a wistful longing to hear from God in the same simple and unaffected way. Prayer is a dialogue, a conversation with God, not a monologue or soliloquy. We need to learn to listen and hear his side of the conversation, and it should not be uncommon for us to hear him say something. He has promised in his word, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault” (James 1:5).
One morning recently, I woke up feeling heavy and depressed about a situation at the college. There had been a great deal of controversy over a theological stance my staff and I had taken; I had received a lot of criticism and personal attack. I was having second thoughts. It’s one thing to get hammered for doing the right thing, it’s another thing to get hammered for doing the wrong—or the stupid—thing.
I was inquiring of the Lord: Was I doing the right thing, seeing that it would stir up so much anger? Should I have taken a softer position, a more gentle approach? Was my timing off? I opened my Bible to the daily reading, and the psalm happened to be Psalm 130, which begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.…” That matched my mood perfectly! I prayed that verse again and again with deep feeling, grateful to God for the voice his Word gave to my emotions. Since the psalm is a penitential psalm, I wondered if God were indeed telling me that I should back off the position I had taken.
But as I prayed, my eyes wandered to the center of the page to a column of cross-references parallel to that verse. They related to the psalm I had read several days before, Psalm 129—yes, I had missed a few days of Bible reading.
It’s a psalm that begins with “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth … but they have not gained the victory over me.” Certainly a psalm of a different stripe, a psalm not of penitence but of resistance! It prays, in effect, “Lord, they have treated me terribly, but they haven’t gotten the better of me.” Years before, on another occasion of reading that psalm, I had highlighted the cross-references for those words. They were the cross-references my eyes fell upon that morning, the words that God spoke to Jeremiah: ” ‘Get yourself ready! Stand up and say to them whatever I command you. Do not be terrified by them, or I will terrify you before them. Today I have made you a fortified city, an iron pillar and a bronze wall to stand against the whole land.… They will fight against you but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you,’ says the Lord” (1:17-19).
Of course, I found the content and the timing of these words stunning, given my situation.
But I was wondering if I had fallen into a pit of subjectivity and self-justification when I met with my wife for our morning prayer time. Had I made the Bible a kind of Rorschach inkblot upon which to project my own perceptions and desires? I shared with her what I had experienced and read, and watched her eyes grow wide as she cold me the Jeremiah passage was the exact text she had been praying over that morning, line for line, as part of her daily reading. Since that morning it hasn’t become any more pleasant to take the stand I have taken, but it has been easier.
Sweet voice
The promise of God to give wisdom to those who ask for it has been vividly real to me as I have cultivated an attitude of quiet listening, of being open to hearing his end of the dialogue. I spend more time alone, in silence, than I used to—rising early to be in solitude and stillness. I joke with my friends that the chief spiritual danger in getting up so early is self-righteousness, the smugness that can creep into my soul when I know that as I am praying, others are sleeping. But in all honesty, I get up not to achieve an elite level of spiritual athleticism; I get up because it is so good and pleasant to do so. I can hardly call it a discipline anymore. It is so delicious, so ineffably sweet to hear the Lord, the Good Shepherd speak, or even to hope that he might. It isn’t so much that God speaks directly during those times; rather, the stillness prepares me to be alert to those whispers and nudges I might receive from him as I drive my car or walk across campus. Fernando Ortega sings a song that speaks of how desolate we are until God speaks, and how richly blessed we are when he does:
O Thou, in whose presence
my soul takes delight,
On whom in affliction I call,
My comfort by day
and my song in the night,
My hope, my salvation, my all!
Where dost Thou dear Shepherd,
resort with Thy sheep,
To feed them in pastures of love?
Say why in the valley of death
should I weep?
Or alone in this wilderness roam?
O why should I wander
an alien from Thee?
Or cry in the desert for bread?
Thy foes will rejoice
when my sorrows they see,
And smile at the tears I have shed.
He looks and ten thousands
of angels rejoice,
And myriads wait for His word.
He speaks, and eternity
filled with His voice,
Reechoes the praise of the Lord.
Dear Shepherd, I hear,
and will follow Thy call,
I know the sweet sound of Thy voice.
Restore and defend me,
for Thou art my all,
And in Thee I will ever rejoice!
1
The Paraclete
Thoughts like these are preposterous to postmodern sensibilities—only the arrogantly foolish could believe that almighty God would speak to a mere fallible, contingent human. But they are in perfect accord with what biblical revelation tells us of the God to whom we pray, who calls us each by name, numbers the hairs on our head, and even helps us to pray. The Bible says God gives us his Spirit to help us in our weakness since “we do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will” (Rom. 8:26-27).
Jesus called the Spirit the “Counselor” or “Comforter” or “Helper” or “Advocate,” depending on how the word he used is translated. The variety of words indicates the difficulty of finding an English word to match the Greek word used by Jesus. The word, parakletos, is a compound of two words, para, “alongside” and kletos, from kalein, “to call.” Parakletos was used by the Greeks to describe someone called to one’s side for help and encouragement. In its verb form, that is exactly what it means: to help and to encourage. Paul, for example, tells the Colossians that he is sending them his friend Tychicus so he may encourage, be a paraclete to their hearts. To the Corinthians, Paul describes God as the “Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles” (2 Cor. 1:3-4). Comfort is the word the translators of the NIV used for paraclete. What Jesus is saying is that just as he came alongside his disciples in their life’s journey, so he will continue to come alongside them in the paraclete, the Holy Spirit.
Surgeon Paul Brand tells a story that provides a gripping picture of the work of the paraclete.
He was a junior doctor in a London hospital when one day he came into the room of an eighty-one-year-old cancer patient named Mrs. Twigg. Her cancer was in her throat and, as he describes it, this “spry, courageous woman … had asked that we do all we could medically to prolong her life, and one of my professors removed her larynx and the malignant tissue around it.”
Brand received an urgent summons to her ward one day, and walked in to find her bleeding profusely from her mouth. He guessed immediately that an artery on the back of her throat had eroded. There was only one thing he knew to do to stop the bleeding: apply pressure. They had only to wait for the surgeon and the anesthetist to arrive. Looking into her terror-stricken eyes as she fought the urge to gag, he assured her that he would not remove his finger until it was absolutely safe to do so. He describes what happened:
We settled into position. My right arm crooked behind her head, supporting her. My left hand nearly disappeared inside her contorted mouth, allowing my index finger to apply pressure at the critical point. I knew from visits to the dentist how fatiguing and painful it must be for tiny Mrs. Twigg to stretch her mouth open wide enough to surround my entire hand. But I could see in her intense blue eyes a resolution to maintain that position for days if necessary. With her face a few inches from mine, I could sense her mortal fear. Even her breath smelled of blood. Her eyes pleaded mutely, “Don’t move—don’t let go!” She knew, as I did, if we relaxed our awkward posture, she would bleed to death.
We sat like that for nearly two hours. Her imploring eyes never left mine. Twice during the first hour, when muscle cramps painfully seized my hand, I tried to move to see if the bleeding had stopped. It had not, and as Mrs. Twigg felt the rush of warm liquid surge up her throat she gripped my shoulder anxiously.
I will never know how I lasted that second hour. My muscles cried out in agony. My fingertip grew totally numb. I thought of rock-climbers who have held their fallen partners for hours by a single rope. In this case the cramping four-inch length of my finger, so numb I could not even feel it, was the strand restraining life from falling away.
I, a junior doctor in my twenties, and this eighty-one-year-old woman clung to each other superhumanly because we had no choice—her survival demanded it. 2
Finally the surgeon came, and they were wheeled into the operating room. There, as everyone stood poised with gleaming tools, he slowly removed his finger as her aged hand clutched his wrist. When his finger was totally removed, a smile spread across her bruised lips. The clot had held. She would be all right. With no larynx, only her eyes could express her gratitude.
“She knew how my muscles had suffered,” writes Brand. “I knew the depths of her fear. In those two hours in the slumberous hospital wing, we had become almost one person.”3
After telling this story, Dr. Brand made two comments: In all of his years as a physician, the thing that keeps coming back to him time and again from his patients is that when they are on their backs and at the very extremes of their ability to believe and to endure, only one kind of person can help. That person rarely has any answers to their questions, he seldom has a winsome and effervescent personality. It is always someone who does not judge or give advice but who will simply be there with them in their suffering, who will be present, perhaps to share tears, or a hug, or a lump in the throat.
Stated theologically, the most helpful person is a paraclete, one who comes alongside.
Brand’s other comment came by way of a quotation by John V. Taylor about the Holy Spirit. He said, “The Holy Spirit is the force in the straining muscles of an arm, the film of sweat between pressed cheeks, the mingled wetness on the back of soft clasped hands. He is as close and as unobtrusive as that, and as irresistibly strong.”4
That is the God of the Bible. He knit us together in our mother’s womb, knows each of our words before we speak them—and he speaks. Why should we find that surprising? Such a God is not only a spiritual reality, but an emotional necessity.
Psychologist Rollo May argued in his 1960s bestseller, Love and Will, that our age can be best characterized by the word apathy, meaning “a state of feelinglessness, the despairing possibility that nothing matters.” He said the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy—being uninvolved, detached, unrelated; the violence of our times, he said, is the direct result of ” affectionlessness as an attitude toward life.”5 In an age of mass communication, the average person is anonymous and alienated. Dozens of TV personalities come smiling into his living room each evening. He knows them all, but is himself completely unknown. He can spend years in a factory, a shop, an office, a family, even a church—without meeting anyone who takes the slightest interest in him as a person, in his intimate concerns, in his difficulties, in his secret aspirations.
When one cannot touch or be touched, violence then springs up as a kind of demonic need for contact. In this bizarre state of affairs, painful for anyone to bear, the mood of the unknown person becomes, “If I cannot affect or touch anybody, I can at least shock you into some feeling, force you into some passion through wounds and pain; I shall at least make sure we both feel something, and I shall force you to see me and know that I also am here.”6
Significantly, apathy comes from the Greek words apatheia, without, and pathos, feeling—the term used by first-century Greeks to describe God. They reasoned that God could not at the same time be God and feel for people, because God, by definition, is high above us and splendidly removed from the sweat and blood of human life. To be affected by us would be to make him less than us.
That was what made the gospel so scandalous to the Greek mind. It told of a God who entered human history in Jesus Christ, feeling all we feel and suffering all we suffer. The word became flesh and “moved into the neighborhood,” to use Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of John 1:14 (The message). That is, the God assumed in Christian prayer is personal, he knows us, he hears us, he listens, really listens, and he speaks.
In the film Oh, God!, George Burns portrays God as an approachable and likable person with a good sense of humor and a keen appreciation of the foibles of being a human being. When he first appears to the young man played by John Denver, he so impresses him with his miracles that the young man becomes attached to him and detached from his fellow human beings. To remedy this, God announces that he will put on no more miraculous displays and will disappear from sight. The young man is heartbroken: “But won’t I be able to talk to you anymore?” he cries. God smiles. “You talk,” he says, “I’ll listen.”
This was Hollywood’s lame attempt to make sense of the apparent silence of God in human affairs—to make him out as a kind of giant nondirective therapist in the sky, a cosmic Carl Rogers. God doesn’t say much, but he’s a good listener. But a good listener will say something. He’ll do more than just nod and smile, sphinxlike. A good listener gets involved. God is a good listener. In fact, he is so involved that we would never speak to him had he not first spoken to us. God is the great initiator.
In this sense, P. T. Forsyth was right when he said all our prayers are answers to God’s.
Eye opener
So God speaks. But how can we hear his voice?
By praying obediently, being willing to do what we hear if we hear it. When George MacDonald said, “Obedience is the opener of eyes,” I believe he was exegeting the words of Jesus to skeptics: “If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own” (John 7:17, italics mine). We won’t know until we’re willing to obey. Obedience is the basis of biblical epistemology.
I first began to understand this the summer between my ninth- and tenth-grade years.
My next-door neighbor was two years ahead of me in school and a bright and argumentative nonbeliever. Many warm evenings we would argue about the existence of God until late at night. To a stalemate. It was so clear to me that God did exist, it was obvious to him that he didn’t, or so he argued.
One evening the insight came to me from the parable Jesus told about the rich man and the beggar, Lazarus. In the parable, Jesus told of how the rich man, after a life of callous selfishness, ended up burning in hell and watching from afar the bliss of Lazarus in heaven at Abraham’s side. The rich man begged for help. Would Abraham please dip his finger in water to cool his tongue? No, he couldn’t. Would he then send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his brothers who awaited the same fate if they did not change their ways? No, he wouldn’t. Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.”
The formerly rich man didn’t think that was enough. But if someone actually came back from the grave to warn them—perhaps like Marley to Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—then they would believe and repent, wouldn’t they? Abraham’s answer is instructive: “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:19-31). Even seeing won’t be believing if they aren’t willing to obey.
So I put the question to my friend: “If God appeared before us, right here, on the front porch of this house, and you knew beyond any doubt that it was actually God standing there, would you commit your life to him to obey all his laws?”
In a moment of unguarded candor, he said, “Well, I’d have to think about that.” His answer explained his inability to believe, to know. I’ve come to believe that I won’t hear from God unless I am first willing to act on what I’ve heard. God hides himself from those who refuse to obey, so that “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” (Mark 4:12).
Listening disciplines
Asking God to speak is subject to the same rule chat asking God to do anything else is.
Jesus said, “Ask whatever you wish and it will be given you.” The condition for that kind of answered prayer is in the line that precedes it: “If you remain in me and my words remain in you” (John 15:7). Remaining in Jesus is the condition. The Greek word for remaining means literally “to dwell” or “to take up residence.” This word, and what it conveys, was so important to Jesus that he used it eleven times in the first ten verses of John 15. He was saying that prayer must flow out of a relationship of fellowship and communion with him. Answered prayer comes from his living in us and our living in him. It is prayer that is patterned after the prayer life of Jesus himself. His whole life was lived in total and unbroken communion with God. There was absolutely no distinction between his will and his Father’s will. He could say to the Pharisees that “the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does” (John 5:19). In another place, Jesus told the crowd gathered to hear him preach, “The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him” (John 8:29). Before he commanded the dead man Lazarus to rise from the dead, he lifted his eyes to God and prayed, ” ‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me’ ” (John 11:41-42).
Note that it was almost as though he need not even ask God to raise Lazarus, but only to say the word, because his will was so conformed to God’s will. This is prayer at its highest and deepest. It is prayer that is in communion with the risen Jesus, that lives and abides and dwells in him. “Keep close to the New Testament Christ,” writes P. T. Forsyth, “and then ask for anything you desire in that contact. Ask for everything you can ask in Christ’s name, i.e., everything desirable by a man who is in Christ’s kingdom of God, by a man who lives for it at heart, everything in tune with the purpose and work of the kingdom in Christ.”7 In that kind of obedient praying, it is the most natural of events to hear the voice of the living God speak.
There are some ways, discipline if you will, to learn to pray obediently.
One way is to pray Scripture. Naturally the great prayers of Scripture, of Jesus, of the prophets and apostles, lend themselves to this. Almost any text can be meditated on and formed into a prayer. The value of praying Scripture is that it can train us to feel what it expresses, to think God’s thoughts after him, and thus to tune our hearts to hear God’s voice in other ways. The same can be said of some of the prayers of godly saints through the ages, such as the prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” These represent the distilled wisdom of God’s people and can train our hearts in obedient prayer. My own practice has been to pray through the Psalter each month, five psalms a day. I have also memorized all of the prayers of St. Paul, praying them over and over until they become my own. I believe this discipline has trained my heart and my ears to hear the Lord.
Another discipline is to take some minor risks in prayer—to respond to nudges of the Holy Spirit. Most of us have felt moved from time to time in prayer to make a telephone call or write a note to someone. For years I regarded those thoughts as distractions. Now I see them as possible nudges from the Lord to do something he wants done. I have often been amazed and delighted at what happens when I follow those promptings. I have often been the beneficiary of those who did.
One spring day in 1993, I was so discouraged I didn’t know how I could go on with my work. I prayed with my wife over my anguish and went outside for a long walk, hoping that the physical activity would renew my spirits. It didn’t. I walked back into the house and heard the telephone ringing; the last thing I wanted to do was pick up the telephone. I usually screen my calls by listening to the voice on the other end of the line coming through the answering machine. The voice was that of a woman who was new to the church. She was apologizing for calling at home, but felt there was something I needed to know. Against my normal impulses, I picked up the telephone. She apologized again and said, “I hope you don’t think I’m crazy, but as I was praying this morning you came to mind, along with a Bible reference I did not know. I looked it up and have no idea if it would mean anything to you, but I felt that somehow I would be disobedient to God if I didn’t give it to you.”
She apologized again and then gave me the passage. It was Hebrews 10:35-39. She apologized once more, said good-bye, and hung up. The passage read:
So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so chat when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. For in just a very little while, “He who is coming will come and will not delay. But my righteous one will live by faith. And if he shrinks back, I will not be pleased with him.” But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved.
Need I say that those words were meaningful to me? I have since had them written in calligraphy and framed as a memorial to God’s faithfulness to speak when I needed a word from him and to a woman’s faithfulness to risk in obedience to God, to act on a nudge. Sometimes I wonder in frustration why God doesn’t speak to me. Does God wonder in frustration why it is that he has spoken, and I haven’t listened—because I have been too busy or rationalistic or timid to obey?
Grammar of existence
Closely allied to praying obediently is praying humbly. That means keeping clear on what philosopher Peter Kreeft calls the “grammar of existence” and remembering that God is God and we are not. God reserves the right to speak when and what and how he desires. We may place no demands on him. We may pray the prayer of Mary before and after God speaks: “I am the Lord’s servant, may it be to me as you have said.” Sometimes God will answer our question with another question.
A friend went to his church on a Saturday night to lead a small prayer gathering. He waited, but no one showed up. He was alone in an empty church, sitting in that peculiar sort of Saturday-night deadness churches can have, feeling the acute kind of disappointment only a pastor knows when no one shows up to pray. At first he thought, What a waste of time. Lord. Then he decided to sit and be still— and he realized he was, as he described it, “listening in silence.” He listened and he heard a question from God: “Will you honor me?” It was a deep and probing question, one that has stuck with him and that he is trying to apply to other areas of his life. It’s much harder to hear a good question than an obvious directive. A question requires more of us—the humility to engage God on the level he chooses. He who asks the questions sets the agenda.
We should be suspicious of those telling us prayer taps into a divine power source. The image is of a utility line, which we can switch on or off—whenever we wish. It’s there when we need it and waiting to be used when we don’t need it. This view of prayer, however, betrays our hubris and consumerism. It makes God a handyman we can hire out from time to time for various projects. There is power in prayer, all right, as Virginia Stem Owens writes, “It is fearsome to the last degree. It is not a power that can be harnessed. The images from the Bible shatter us with their uncontrollable force. A dove descends. Tongues of fire flame out. An angel appears. A bush burns. A mountain trembles. A whirlwind answers. God invades.”8
Owens recounts how she decided that after she had laid out her requests before God in her evening prayers, she would then listen for God to say something back to her. She waited in the darkness for something to come, but heard nothing. Finally, tired and dissatisfied, she went to sleep. The night passed, but in the early morning hours, just before dawn, she found herself awake and weeping. There was in her mind the memory of a spinster aunt who had come to live with her family when Owens was a young adolescent. Her family had just moved, and she had been promised a room of her own in the move. But with her aunt’s arrival, it was her brother who got the new room and Owens who got a roommate, a semi-invalid aunt who had been forced to live with relatives her whole life. Over the weeks and months that followed, Owens barely concealed her bitterness at this injustice, showing it in a thousand subtle and caustic ways. She had carried the grudge her whole life:
But now, in this early morning light, I was feeling for the first time the scalding shame this elderly woman must have felt. Moving from house to house, never having one of her own. Totally dependent on the good graces of nieces and nephews for the very necessities of life. Never in all my years at home, or indeed until now, had I given a single thought to how she felt in the situation. But now I was getting a full dose of it—the pride that had to be swallowed daily in a galling gulp. It was more bitter than I could bear. 9
The next evening she repeated the same exercise, offering her petitions to God and then listening awhile before drifting off to sleep. The same kind of thing happened the next morning over another incident from her past, again with the same shattering results. She wasn’t quite so sure she wanted to hear from God anymore!
Such has been the experience of the Jeremiahs and Pauls and other great men and women of prayer down through the centuries. They pray for God to change things in their world, and he begins by changing them. They tell God what is on their minds and he tells them what is on his mind: them!
“Awful things happen to people who pray,” says Owens. “Their plans are frequently disrupted. They end up in strange places.… The well-worn phrase, ‘Prayer changes things,’ often meant to comfort, is as tricky as any Greek oracle.”10
It takes humility to listen to God, because it may be humbling to hear from him.
Constant prayer is another way to cultivate an ear to hear the voice of God. Jesus said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). He is the sole source of our life. Branches receive no life-giving sap unless they remain in constant contact with the vine. We receive no life unless we stay in constant contact with Christ. Thankfully, our contact with him is not dependent on our resolve to hold on to him but on his resolve to hold on to us. He wants us to live and dwell in him more than we want to live and dwell in him. But because God wills communion with us, we are therefore exhorted to have communion with him, as branches in a vine.
That was the secret of Jesus’ life: his constant contact with God.
For the sake of the whole
Early in my Christian life I had impressed on me the critical importance of a daily quiet time, of time set aside to be alone with God. Over the years I have learned chat lesson well. My favorite time of the day is the time I spend, usually early in the morning, alone with God. But I have begun to realize that I can treat that time like a physical workout: once I have done it, I’m done with it until the next day. I don’t give God much thought the rest of the day. I was disdainful of those who told me they didn’t have time to spend an hour in prayer each day, so they prayed in their car on the way to work and throughout the day as the opportunity presented itself.
I now repent of my disdain. But it’s not either/or—either I pray for an hour in the morning or I pray through the day. It’s both/and.
The purpose of setting apart an hour in the morning is so that all the other hours may be God’s as well. Theologian Stephen Winward opened me up to this insight: We sanctify a part not so we may forget about the whole, but for the sake of the whole. We dedicate an hour to the Lord, so all our hours may be his.
Well known is that practice to the medieval monk Brother Lawrence, who “practiced the presence of God” as he went about his daily duties in the monastery. His daily duties consisted chiefly of scrubbing pots and pans in the kitchen. But as he scrubbed, he might comment to Jesus on how dirty a pan was. As he stacked the dishes high, he would thank the Lord for how well he had provided for him and his brother monks. This was not all his prayer, for there were also the high and holy moments in the quietness of his room and the sanctuary when he prayed on his knees. But that was of one piece with the low, but no less holy, moments when he scrubbed dishes and spoke with Jesus about the scrubbing.
I read about how Ronda Chervin, a housewife and associate professor of philosophy at Marymount University, has found ways to pray throughout her day. She prays while ironing, for the person whose clothing she is working on. She prays while walking down the street, for each person she meets. She prays when unable to see a friend, “wrapping my love with a prayer and sending it through the Lord.”11 She prays when thinking of her old friends, remembering their needs before God. She prays upon entering each new phase of the day or when facing a difficult situation, speaking to the Lord and thanking him that she is not alone and that he makes all things work together for the good.
Apricot pie a la mode?
Maybe the last and best thing to be said about listening for God’s voice is that it can be such a joy, such fun, and so funny. God really is more interested in being heard than we are to hear him. It delights him to speak to his children and for them to hear. Even in the seriousness of the matters that concern us, we can be delighted, too.
As I mentioned earlier, after fourteen years of pastoring a church in Irvine, California, I was extended a call to pastor a church in New Providence, New Jersey. To accept the church’s invitation would mean going from a church that I had founded to a church that was over two hundred and fifty years old. I would be its twenty-ninth pastor. It would mean a Southern California boy moving his family to the northeastern United States, two regions separated by much more than miles.
So Lauretta and I went away for two days to pray for the essence of the Southern California I loved. For two days we walked the beaches and prayed and talked. But we heard nothing from God. The last evening we were there, we were having dessert at a Marie Callender’s restaurant on the island. I was eating my favorite, apricot pie a la mode, as Lauretta and I discussed the situation. Then God spoke. It was as if, as I talked, I detached from my head and was hovering about two feet above me and slightly to my right. God was standing at my side.
He said, “You’re resisting me, Ben.”
I said, “I know.”
He said, “It’s because you don’t want to go through the pain of saying good-bye to your friends.”
I said, “That’s true.”
Then he said, “But that’s not a good enough reason to say no to me.”
I interrupted Lauretta and said, “God is calling us to go to New Jersey.”
She said, “I know.”
We both burst into tears. Some of mine fell into the pie.
What a ride it has been since then—desperately difficult, incredibly interesting, and, yes, hilarious—I mean, apricot pie a la mode? The Steven Curds Chapman song says it all for Lauretta and me: “There’s no better place to be than on the road to heaven, with Jesus by our side, our paraclete, whispering in our ears, leading us on.”12
“O Thou, in Whose Presence,” sung by Fernando Ortega, This Bright Hour, Myrrh Records, 1997; Words: Joseph Swaim, Music: Freeman Lewis, Arrangement: Fernando Ortega and John Andrew Schreiner.
Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), 202.
Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: Norton, 1969), 30.
Virgima Stem Owens, Christianity Today, November 19, 1976: 17-21.
“No Better Place,” sung by Steven Curtis Chapman, For the Sake of the Call, Sparrow Song, 1990; words by Steven Curtis Chapman.
Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson
