Awakenedনমুনা

His voice and His methods

I think that the main point of being awakened in the first place is to arrive at a place where we truly hear the voice of God. It may not be an audible sound, but God is everywhere, desperately trying to communicate with the crown of His creation. 

We have done a great job of restricting how we allow God to speak to us. Many of us expect God to speak through a particular way of reading the Bible, or through a very narrow genre of music which we have labelled ‘worship’. But God isn’t dictated by our constraints. He is bursting through our restrictions with explosions of love and communications, but if we’re blinkered by our expectations, we risk missing it! 

Being awakened to His voice isn’t only about hearing Him more clearly, but hearing Him in unlikely places. God is able to speak in the most unusual of situations. It shouldn’t come as a great surprise when He speaks – we should always expect to hear His voice. He’s constantly speaking, singing and praying over us, but we only like to tune in to one kind of communication. 

Often, because we are so wrapped up in circumstances we have been programmed to think of as ‘bad’, we miss God speaking. We put up walls and shields as a coping mechanism, and miss God shooting arrows of love and fresh air that could be seeing us through. This leads to feeling even more alone, deserted and abandoned. 

We are created to communicate and dwell with God. When He calls out to us, we are designed to run to Him. Everything in us is created to respond to His voice; we are designed to walk with Him like the first humans did in Eden. All of creation is crying out in response to His creating voice, including us. All of us is responding to all of Him. And yet we often don’t see that our cells are exploding with the life that He put there! 

Life is like an ocean. It's full of currents pulling us in directions we didn't know existed. It can get rough in an instant, but it can be beautiful and refreshing at times too. Sometimes we're ready and waiting for these waves, because we know we're walking through a storm. We saw them coming: it started with a light drizzle, the winds picked up, and we were ready with our coats, boots and umbrellas, heading as quickly as we can into calm waters.

Other times we're happily enjoying a quiet, peaceful picnic for the soul, and in an instant we are being pounded with the lashing rains of a storm that arrived with no warning. We're not ready! We're left outside in our summer clothes, getting soaked to the bone, and our picnic has turned to a soggy, unappetizing mess. The rain stings our skin, and we can't see anything clearly, so we just sit there, getting drenched, hoping it'll pass quickly so we can get back to life.

But what if God had a plan in the suddenness of the storm? What if His intention is to catch us unawares? What if He didn't want picnic food to satisfy us anymore? What if He has things He wants to do in us during the storm? I’m certain that He wants us to stop fighting the tides and let Him carry us.

God knows that He gets a lot less done in us when we're prepared to fix all the things which are going 'wrong' around us. We don't look to see if these circumstances are God's way of doing a work in us; we just get on and ‘fix’ it. But perhaps that's exactly why some storms come suddenly out of the blue. Because in His mercy, He saves us from ourselves, from our incessant need to ‘fix’ everything and find the easy way out.

God is always good. His grace abounds -it engulfs us, surrounds us, and carries us in His currents to the places He wants us to be. If we stop fighting the storm and all it brings, we might discover that we have been transformed, washed clean, renewed, restored and directed in ways we never could have accomplished for ourselves.

Today, try to remember that God isn't as interested in saving us from our circumstances, as He is in saving us from ourselves, using the circumstances as His tools. Follow Him into the eye of the storm, knowing that being in the storm with Him IS His great rescue plan.