Listening

I'm not very good at hearing God's voice. Actually, it's more that I'm not very good at believing it's him and then listening. I sometimes ask God if he'll start me out with easy stuff so that when the big stuff comes, I won't be so opposed to it.

I heard a story of some cool evangelist who felt like God was telling him to go to the park in the middle of the night. He went and ended up finding some desperate guy and led him to the Lord. Instead of hearing that story and getting exited, my first thought was, "Oh Lord, please don't ask me to do that kind of stuff because I probably won't listen and then I'll be disobeying you."

Last Friday I was up at 5:30 a.m. helping Rob get off to work. Usually when he leaves I go back to sleep for another 3 hours. On Friday, I started thinking about Ruth, our elderly neighbor. Immediately I tried to push her out of my head because I was so opposed to the idea that God would want me to go down to her apartment and check on her. It took me about 30 minutes to push it out. Then I didn't know if I was causing myself to think of her because of my immediate assumption or if God was still trying to speak to me.

Well, I didn't go down there. I've been thinking about her ever since wondering if she fell and broke something or died or needed to talk about God. I went down there today, and she was fine. No broken bones, no death, no revelations.

I've struggled with hearing, believing, and obeying God's voice for a long time. There have even been times when I thought he was telling me to do something kinda strange, and I'd do it only to look back later and laugh sure that it wasn't a God thing. One time I got in the listening and obeying mode and soon felt like I was on a wild goose chase being told to do only the things that I didn't want to do, like go to my neighbor's house at 5 in the morning. That's when I stopped and decided that it wasn't necessarily God. I've been confused ever since.

Just a random tidbit of my week.