Hearing God’s Voice

The other day I was in the bathroom trying to – surprise! – use the bathroom with some semblance of privacy. This is just one of the things you take for granted before becoming a mom of little ones.

First, the baby crawled over to me and pulled up on my legs. “Gaga. Dada. Ba-ba-baaaaaa,” she told me.

“Oh, really?” I replied.

My preschooler, who normally understands the importance of some solitude during potty time (at least for herself), didn’t want to be left out of our tête-à-tête. “Hi, Mommy,” she said, as she opened the door.

“Hi,” I said.

Then she turned off the light. “Please don’t do that,” I asked as I turned it on again. (I was trying to squeeze in a few minutes of reading pleasure as well.)

She switched it to the off position. I turned it on. We repeated this process a dozen times before I sighed in exasperation and said, “Why can’t you just listen to me?”

Hmmmm…No doubt God is often tempted to ask the exact same thing of me, only his store of patience isn’t (thankfully) as finite as my own.

A dear friend of mine recently told me that God’s voice is like a heartbeat. Every once in awhile it’s very clear – like your heart thundering after you’ve finished a high-impact run. You can feel your heart pounding in your chest and you can hear it thumping away in your eardrums.

Other times, if you’re anything like me, you have to really try hard to find that slow ba-boom, ba-boom. You wonder if your heart’s pumping at all. Of course it is, but it can be disconcerting when you can’t seem to locate your pulse.

God’s voice is most often like the pulse you have to search for – it’s always there just like your heartbeat, but sometimes it takes a lot of time to find it and to hear it.

Like a doctor using a stethoscope, you may have to sometimes use tools to listen it. The best tool we have is prayer. The more time we spend in prayer, the easier it will become to hear God’s voice.

I’ve found that praying during Adoration is the stethoscope for me or in the very least, it’s like a sprint that sets my heart racing and makes me aware that God is near. When I’m sharing the room with Christ, his voice becomes so much louder and clearer. My distractions fade and it’s just him and me talking and listening to one another.

“Why can’t you just listen to Me?”

Because, like my preschooler, I’ve got a mind of my own. I’m stubborn. I’m a control freak. I turn a deaf ear to you. I’m testing you to see if you’re really there. Thankfully, you keep on talking until I finally start to listen.