Through out my life, I’ve heard people say how they heard God talk to them and I’ve never fully understood or believed them. I thought it was great for them to feel like they had that connection, but didn’t think it was plausible. I thought that because I couldn’t give an example of God talking to me, but that changed.
At training camp, a woman came to speak to us about listening prayer. She said listening prayer is when you pray with the expectation that God wants to speak back. She used John 16:7-13 as has good listening prayer can be. In those verses, God tells His disciples that it is better for Him to leave so that the Holy Spirit can come live in ALL people. The Holy Spirit living in us gives us the opportunity to have intimacy with God at any given moment.
I realized that I needed to be open to the idea of God responding to me, and give Him room to talk. We were encouraged to go have a conversation with God and tell Him what was on my mind. I started out by asking if this process could even work and I felt a steady response of “It can.”
I continued to talk and just tell Him what I had been going through. I was jealous of others who were hearing Him so clearly, and once again, I got a response of, “Don’t be. It will come.” I continued talking and realized quickly that I our God is a funny and wise God. I found myself chuckling to myself as we talked.
We were then told to huddle together in our groups and listen to what God told us to say to encourage one another. A lot of our thoughts lined up and it was so uplifting to hear what others heard about us.
This blog post doesn’t even capture the amazing experience that I was a part of, but I hope it sheds some light on the fact that God does reply to us and He wants to have intimate conversations with us. God will never hit us with a read and no reply.
