Far more precious

God is always speaking. He is a kinetic God, always at work, always moving, always communicating, always creating. He tells us that He never sleeps. When He is working, He is speaking. The prophet Elijah heard His voice in the breeze. My friend hears His voice in her garden. Another friend hears His voice in her music. When we have ears to hear, we will hear Him.

I’ve told you that God talks to me. He does. He speaks to me as He speaks to all of us: through His Word, through His church, through worship, and through creation. Beyond that, He will prompt me specifically, at times, to obey Him or follow Him in a particular way. There is a way that I hear His voice, and I always struggle with exactly how to describe it. It’s a resonating timbre of cadence that I hear in my head and in my heart and in my womb. I know His voice, and sometimes I ignore it. God forgive me when I ignore it. Most of the time, I try to follow it. I do confess that, sometimes, I don’t. And He never lets me get away with that.

Recently, God has been organizing my life in a beautifully undeniable way in order to heal some deeply wounded and broken places in my heart. Recently, within my journey to this healing, I stumbled over myself and was hurtful to someone important. I ignored the fact that we are all made in the image of God and, therefore, we are all immeasurably valuable and incredibly vulnerable, deserving of reverence and grace. By ignoring another’s worth, I ignored my own. I was untrustworthy. It hurt.

Have you ever done this? Have you ever been hurtful, unkind, selfish, or cruel? I am certain we all have. People are messy, and relationships are uncontrolled experiments with variable outcomes. You can’t really know what you’ll do sometimes when you find yourself in unfamiliar territory, and experience is the one thing you don’t have until right after you need it the most. Suddenly you learn terrible lessons about your own humanity.

For a time, I stopped listening, and it was hurtful. I think I hurt myself more than I hurt anyone else. Being a trustworthy person is primarily about being trustworthy with yourself.

God spoke to me soon after and told me to ask for forgiveness.

I knew it was God saying it because this kind of directive is characteristic of God. He teaches us that our ministry as believers is a ministry of reconciliation. We are to work to reconcile ourselves to Him, for we are separate from Him because of the sin in our hearts and the brokenness of the world. We are also to work to reconcile ourselves to each other, for we are the Church – His beautiful Bride – and we are not to have anything between each other. We must bind ourselves together in His love. It is not an easy task. We are so hurtful to one another … so unkind, selfish, even cruel. We who belong to Him can be even more so, for we know the way we ought to live, and when we don’t, it is a betrayal.

The moment I asked for forgiveness, I sensed I had done something big. I don’t mean that I deserve any praise – in fact, I deserve none at all - or that what I had done was some monumental accomplishment – because it certainly was not. It’s just that I was in awe, in that moment, of the power of God in humility. I was struck by how life is measured by moments like those, when we admit our shortcomings and ask to be released from any debt we incur with another because of them. It is an incredible door that both slams in the face of hell and opens to us a view of heaven. Heaven must be a place where true relationship is possible, where we can live relaxed and open to all of the love, compassion, grace, and connection that is available to us through the redeeming work of Jesus Christ. We attempt these relationships on earth and fail continually, of course, but God is always speaking to us. He is teaching us and guiding us, and when we listen and do what He asks, He brings us one step closer to heaven, even heaven on earth. That is the true work of the Kingdom. That is the really big deal.

It occurs to me now that I often associate God’s voice with the voice of Father Patrick Henry Reardon. Anyone who has heard Father Pat speak would sympathize with how I could make this association. If there is a man with a voice like God's, it's him. His voice has a rich, thundering tone, one that would blow a roof off a building if he were to be inspired to raise it loud enough. There are many reasons I would never want to make the man angry, but one is that I don’t want to hear the sound of his voice telling me why he was. Yet, when he speaks, his voice is tender in modulation and loving in character. It is gentle and powerful. His voice is like the ocean.

About eight months ago, during one of our periodic (but too infrequent) phone calls, I was talking with Father Pat about my vulnerable heart and how I was treading the rocky path of its healing. I will never forget what he said: “Be very careful, dear. Your soul is a jewel; it is not a piece of iron. It deserves the care of a jeweler, not a blacksmith.” When I first heard the words, I believed that he meant that I needed to find someone special who would care for me as the curator cares for the Hope Diamond. I believed that this job description would surely best be filled by someone else who would come along one day. I was wrong. I have come to realize that no one can do for me what I need to do for myself. It’s my job. I am the jeweler. I need to be trustworthy with myself, first and foremost, to treat myself as the immeasurably valuable and incredibly vulnerable creature that I am. Insofar as I am trustworthy with myself, I must always take care to be trustworthy with others.

I can only be trustworthy as long as I am listening to God. And He is speaking. Even when He is silent, He is speaking.

He is speaking.