How Do You Hear From God?

[robGCJAX]

There is a saying that a mystic is someone who prays to God and then waits for an answer. That’s a pretty good definition. I had learned to hear from God when I prayed, but I did not hear words. I would know things or sense things. Some people say that they get a peace; it was that, but much more than that too. Often I would ask a question and the answer would just show up. The answer might come through a Bible reading, from a book, in a sermon, as the result of a situation, or during a mundane conversation. I knew when God was speaking, but He spoke without words.

By now I was going to Charismatic and Pentecostal churches. People there would often say that God told them this, that, or the other. I was not hearing from God in the way they were hearing from God. So I began to ask people how they heard from God, but not the people from those churches. I did not know them that well, and I was embarrassed because I seemed to be the only one there who did not hear in that way.
I asked around in the group of people I knew. I guess I asked the wrong people because most everyone I talked to could not give me an answer. There was a girl at work who was the Christian there. She knew everything, or at least she knew a lot more that we all did. When I asked her she just looked at me with a blank stare. That was it, just a blank stare, then some dead air time and an uncomfortable change of conversation. Well, if she did not know, then maybe hearing God speak in words was not as common as I thought.

Since I could not get a straight answer from anyone I knew, I did what I should have done from the start. No, not ask the people who heard God speak. That would have been too easy. I went to the source: I asked God for an answer. I soon began to find books and tapes on listening to God. I do not remember anything in particular that helped more than something else. It was just a hint here and a bit there. Armed with these fragments
on how to listen to God, I began praying that God would speak to me in words. I don’t have some big amazing event to report. It just happened slowly but surely.

The first step to hearing God was getting quiet. I had been working on this while I learned to pray. Even though I had gotten better at this, there was still a lot of noise in my head. Someone explained the concept of self-talk to me. I hated to be stupid, but I never really thought about how much talk there was going on inside my head. Often it sounded like there was more than one person talking at a time in there. Most of these voices were not telling me good things. They were voices of worry, fear, and condemnation.

A weird event did happen about this time. Not in hearing God, but in not hearing the noise. I was driving into town and trying to sort out the chatter as I went. I had been praying that God would help me with this. The cacophony was obvious now and increasingly irritating. My head sometimes felt like it was stuffed up, in a similar way that sinuses get congested. And then out of nowhere, while cruising down this two lane highway, the voices all stopped.

Just like that, in a moment, it was quiet. It was bizarre, almost frightening. I called this my “blue sky day,� because the inside of my head suddenly became like a cloudless blue sky.

Later on I found out how to keep my head clear. I took some classes and attended a seminar called Cleansing Stream. They taught me how to talk back to the voices in my head. They explained that not all the voices in there were mine. Some of them were, well, evil.

At this same time I was taking some inner healing classes. These classes helped me understand why I was afraid of God and why I wanted to keep my distance. Through these classes I found I was guarding my heart not only from others but also from God. As I began to let go of these barriers that I had erected between me and God, I began to hear God’s still small voice.