Part 3 (2/2)
A woman in Australia named Liz recounted the experience of hearing G.o.d's admonis.h.i.+ng whisper after visiting the brand-new home of her sister-in-law. ”After I left,” Liz wrote, ”I sat in my car outside and felt deep pangs of jealousy and self-pity welling up. I wanted the beautiful home and perfect furnis.h.i.+ngs that my sister-in-law now enjoyed, but as soon as I let myself entertain those thoughts, G.o.d broke in with a simple request: 'Liz, make me your treasure,' he said. 'I am everything you need.'”
A covetous heart had been rebuked and redirected with a single whisper.
Donna also received words of admonishment, in the midst of tough economic times. She wrote: ”It was becoming more apparent that my husband's construction/remodeling business was not going to make it through the downturn, and my own job at a commercial-construction firm would be ending soon as well. I desperately tried to find a new job that would prevent us from losing our home, but after many failed attempts things only became worse.
”Bills I couldn't pay stacked up as my fears multiplied and my anxiety level reached an all-time high. It was in the middle of that reality that I heard a whisper, straight from G.o.d. 'Stop striving,' he said. It wasn't a suggestion; it was a command. 'Stop striving. Stop striving to work so hard. Stop striving to fix this situation. Stop striving to fix your husband. Stop striving and just trust me.'”
Donna did just that and for the first time in a long time, she felt sweet relief from stress. Note again that her circ.u.mstances had not changed. She was still facing serious financial challenges. She still had to look for a new job. But the destructive inner anxiety that drove her obsessive striving had lessened. Such whispers have rescued me from destructive levels of stress more times than I can count.
AFTER DONNA'S EMAIL, AN INTERESTING TRIO OF EMAILS caught my eye. They all had to do with receiving admonishment from G.o.d, but it was the conduits for those corrections that were fascinating to me. One of them came via Oprah Winfrey, one through an iPod, and one by way of a Hawaiian pastor I happen to know and love.
Here's what d.i.c.k wrote: ”Fifteen years ago I was a practicing alcoholic. One day I was working out and saw Oprah on TV. Her guests were an alcoholic and a physician, and she was trying to facilitate healing for the addict that day. It was the start of four or five random occurrences like that, where I'd be flipping television channels and happen upon someone who also was struggling to find sobriety. After that troublesome sequence, I sensed G.o.d say, 'I've shown you the source of your problem. What will you do with what I've revealed? The ball is now in your court.'”
The next night d.i.c.k showed up at a Christian twelve-stepministry meeting at Willow and has been sober ever since. What's more, as a result of that initial divine encounter, d.i.c.k surrendered his life to Jesus Christ and was baptized in June of that year. Only G.o.d.
A young woman named Keri Lynn wrote to tell me that G.o.d spoke to her through her iPod. I raised my eyebrows in skepticism, until I got to the details of what happened that night.
”My parents were away for the weekend,” she wrote, ”and I was driving home from a friend's house late at night. I was on the back roads, which can get a little twisty, and eventually made my way to Elbow Road, a street where lots of people sadly have died from taking the curves too fast.
”I admit I was a little preoccupied, and as I rounded the elbow that gave the street its name, I took the bend a bit too sharply. I hadn't noticed my speed until my iPod shuffled to the song, 'Real Gone,' from the Disney movie, Cars. The lyrics talk about slowing down before you crash, and as I sang along to the catchy tune, I realized it was advice I should immediately take.
”I looked down at my speedometer and took things down a notch (or ten). When I looked back up, I saw a truck barreling toward me from the other side of the road. The load it carried was oversize and barely could fit on one side. I inched to the right to give him more room, but the shoulder was uneven and rough.” The truck pa.s.sed, but Keri Lynn was not out of the woods yet.
”As soon as I heard my right tires. .h.i.t the gravel, I knew things would not end well,” she continued. ”The wheel jerked out of control, and before I could grab it to steady it again, my car swung wildly to the left, onto the other side of the street. In a matter of seconds I careened headfirst into the far-left ditch, flew back out of that ditch and somehow came to a dramatic stop. I stepped out of my car unharmed, which is when I saw a ma.s.sive telephone pole up ahead. Who knows the damage I could have done if I had not slowed down? And who knew G.o.d spoke through iPods?” Keri Lynn surely feels he did.
The third story was from Cathie, a woman who had a difficult relations.h.i.+p with her mom. ”In her heart I know she loves me,” she explained, ”but growing up it didn't feel that way because of the choices that she made.”
Cathie had not spoken to her mom for six full years and said that the Mother's Day card she would send each year was the only communication they had. ”I kept praying that G.o.d would change her,” she said. ”I can't tell you how often I prayed that prayer, but still, G.o.d chose not to act.”
At the end of that six-year run, Cathie was at church one weekend and heard a friend of mine named Wayne Cordeiro speak. ”He challenged us all to read our Bibles daily,” Cathie remembers, ”and my husband and I decided to give it a try. We read every morning and every night, and over time I noticed that something was s.h.i.+fting in me regarding my mother. Was G.o.d answering my prayers through his Word?
”Shortly after that experience my mom became a widow. In the clearest prompting I have ever received, the Holy Spirit instructed me to write her a letter that would hopefully encourage her sad heart. Slowly, she and I began to write each other back and forth until the day dawned when I realized that G.o.d hadn't answered my prayers by changing my mother; he had answered them by changing me.”
Cathie admits that her relations.h.i.+p with her mom is still fragile. But she is quick to add that she knows as long as she stays tethered to the power of G.o.d's Word, his Spirit will have room to work. You and I both could probably learn a thing or two from Cathie's example.
THERE ALSO WERE STORIES THAT CENTERED ON G.o.d'S DESIRE to be first in his children's hearts. Tara recounted, ”I gave my life to Christ at a young age but drifted away from him during my college years. After graduation, I moved away from family and friends, stopped attending church altogether and began making poor choices with my life. I longed for intimacy with G.o.d but couldn't seem to get out of my own way. It went on like this for two years before I stepped foot inside a church again-this time with my family at Christmas. During the singing portion of the service, I sensed G.o.d almost audibly say, 'Enough!' He said it over and over again, to the point that I literally was shaking where I stood. G.o.d had a purpose that I wasn't fulfilling in life, and I knew my only option was to surrender to him for real.
”After that wors.h.i.+p service, my 'next steps' became perfectly clear. I knew I needed to move back to the Midwest, I knew I needed to find a new job and I knew I needed to get connected with a local church. And that's exactly what I did.”
In another case, a guy at Willow named Jim said that on the heels of his wife's untimely death from ocular melanoma he decided to take his RV from Ohio to Colorado. He felt stuck in the overwhelming pain of fresh grief and thought it might help to get away for a while. On the first Sunday morning of his trek, he found his way to a local church. Though he felt disconnected from G.o.d, he yielded to his habit of church attendance. While singing half-heartedly during a congregational wors.h.i.+p song, Jim felt as if G.o.d were saying, ”If you cannot wors.h.i.+p me with all that you have, do not wors.h.i.+p me at all. I do not want your halfway heart.”
As Jim then engaged with full voice, he felt his heart settling back into the full devotion to G.o.d that he had known in the past. As he sang, his tears flowed freely and his grieving soul was steadied once more.
I received other stories of admonishment-how G.o.d corrected a course, reversed a deadly habit, asked for fuller commitment from one of his kids-and each time I'd get to the end of the story, I would think of the power of going G.o.d's way in life instead of insisting on following our own path. Before you get to the final story, please carefully read this next phrase: There is no more critical goal in life than to keep a pliable heart before G.o.d.
G.o.d cannot be seen by spiritual eyes that are shut.
G.o.d cannot be heard by spiritual ears that are plugged.
And G.o.d cannot be followed by a heart that stubbornly stays hard.
A WOMAN NAMED JAN SENT IN A STORY THAT WAS SOBERING to read. When Jan was only eighteen years old she decided to get married. ”I knew the guy was someone I should not have married,” she wrote, ”but I was young and thought that 'love' would make everything right.”
The night before the wedding, during the dress rehearsal of the big event, Jan felt a ”very strong prompting” from the Holy Spirit that she should call the whole thing off.
”I did not listen,” she said. ”And for many, many years after that decision, I found myself stuck with a husband who was emotionally abusive, a practicing alcoholic and extremely fond of being with women besides his wife.”
I got to the last line of Jan's email and just sat there staring at the screen. She wrote, ”I thought you might like to hear from someone who refused to listen to G.o.d.”
I don't know the rest of Jan's story. I do know that G.o.d is in the business of redeeming the messes we make in life, but that doesn't mean there is not a price to pay-often a very steep price-for ignoring G.o.d's whispers of counsel. I don't know how Jan has experienced G.o.d's redemptive intervention in her life, but I am confident she has learned a vital lesson: that many of G.o.d's whispers are offered to save us from difficulties and pain that we don't have the wisdom or maturity to foresee. I pray that we will all keep that lesson in mind.
Whispers of Action
Divine promptings that spur you to action are some of the most important words you'll ever hear. I can remember times when G.o.d prompted me to write a letter, place a call, avoid a particular route home, give a job candidate a shot, engage a grumpy neighbor in friendly conversation and more. Sometimes the whispers are fairly involved and sometimes they're short and sweet. On more occasions than I can possibly count, his most profound words of needed wisdom have been one-word commands like ”Go!” or ”Stop!”
A terrifying example of this happened one time when I was in my car in our driveway. Running late for a meeting at church, I threw my car into reverse and was backing down toward the street, when I received a very strong prompting from G.o.d. ”Stop. Right now!” he urged.
I slammed my foot on the brake and then sat there, thinking, ”Did I forget something in the house? Was Lynne supposed to come with me?”
Figuring I must have just gotten my wires crossed, I glanced in my rearview mirror and was lifting my foot off the brake as I caught sight of our neighbor's three-year-old son, who was riding his tricycle right behind my car. He was so close that all I could see was the top of his little blond head, and had I not stayed planted on those brakes, he surely would have been seriously injured or killed.
I put my car in park, rested my head on the steering wheel and said, ”Oh, G.o.d, that you would be this merciful to that child and to both of our families is beyond me. Thank you.”
Minutes later my neighbors expressed equal grat.i.tude as I stood on their porch with their son and explained the narrow escape.
How important are whispers of action? I'll let you be the judge.
By far the most common stories I received from folks at Willow dealt not with words of a.s.surance or admonition but with whispers that prompt action in accomplis.h.i.+ng kingdom good. Ephesians 2:10 says, ”For we are G.o.d's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which G.o.d prepared in advance for us to do,” and it seems that one of the primary ways G.o.d helps us to get these good works done is by divinely guiding our steps.
So what do ”good works” look like? Based on the hundreds of emails I scoured, they include healing a relations.h.i.+p, impacting a neighborhood, encouraging a friend, expanding a horizon, giving tangible resources, seizing opportunities to serve, sacrificing comfort and more. I wish I had room to share every story I read, because by the end of our time together I think you'd be revved up to go out and do some good!
What follows are a few excerpts, arranged in general categories. As you take in each story, ask G.o.d if there is a ”good work” in this area that he'd like for you to complete. Everyone below testifies that there is no better feeling in all of life than being used for good by G.o.d.
Relational Actions
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