God Doesn't Talk to Me
“God talks to everybody else, but He never talks to me!” It felt like everyone around me was talking about how God spoke to them, and all the exciting experiences He was taking them on. And there I was, out in the cold, only hearing silence in response to my prayers.
I was just a teenager, riding in the back seat of a 4-door Grey Horizon, returning home from a road trip to Northern Idaho with my folks. When we were only a few hours from Boise, I blurted out, “God just doesn’t talk to me!”
I thought a deer jumped into the road in front of our car because we swerved like my Dad was trying to keep from hitting something. But, that wasn’t the case. There was no deer. After the car was back under control, he said, “Tami, what do you mean?”
I repeated, “God just doesn’t speak to me!” and reiterated how I just never hear God say anything. He was beside himself with shock at what I was saying, because he’d just spent the last three days teaching a seminar on how to hear God!
Dad said, “That’s not true, you’ve been able to hear God since you were a little girl! What about the time you lost your doll and we stopped and asked God to show us where it was? Remember how He showed you where to go look, and you ran right over and found it?” And he began to rattle off a list of all the times he remembered that I had those kinds of experiences. He said, “Don’t you remember all of these times?”
I said, “I remember all of those things, but that’s different!”
“How?”, he asked, trying really hard to hide his confusion.
“God didn’t really speak to me. I didn’t actually hear Him say anything,” I answered.
He said, “Ahh, I think I understand now. You think when someone says God spoke to them, it means they actually heard His voice?”
“Well yes, of course,” I said.
“They may say that but it doesn’t mean that’s the way they heard Him. God speaks to us in different ways, more than just actually hearing. He can give us a thought, like a word or a phrase, a concept, a picture in our mind, or a feeling or sensation. Do me a favor, think back to that time we prayed together, and afterward you knew where to find your doll. How did you know where to look?”
“That was easy, I just saw it in my mind.”
“Well, that was God showing you a picture in your mind to let you know where it was!”
“But that’s just natural.”
“Yes! It is natural, and that’s how He speaks to us. We only need to learn to recognize it.”
It’s funny now, thinking back on this conversation and my Dad’s surprise! But this talk helped me so much! I learned God does “speak to me”, and how easy it is to miss it and think it’s just me.
Now, I know I’m not the only one who’s ever felt this way. Especially when we compare our experience with how others portray their interaction with the Lord. Some people make it seem so dramatic and exciting. And that’s how we can so easily overlook the fact we’ve experienced God whisper to our heart or nudge us to do something.
Have you ever felt like I did, that God never speaks to you? And when you hear that one person go on and on about what God is doing in their life, you just feel left out? Well, it simply isn’t true. We know the Lord pursues each of us and yes, even speaks to us. But sometimes it takes an epiphany like I had, through that conversation with my folks, to even recognize that it happens. When we learn how God speaks to us personally, life takes on a new dimension, like going from watching black and white television to technicolor.
Now that I’ve shared my eye-opening experience of realizing how God communicates with us, I wonder if you have a story of your own? I’d love to hear how this resonates with you.
Until then, let’s practice listening and be quick to follow what we “hear” Him whisper to our hearts. This is how we build our faith!
Listening with my heart,
Tami Sorenson Gaupp
