A good day for listening

Earlier this summer I was in a conversation with someone who doesn't share my religious convictions. Some of my spiritual ones, yes. Perhaps. Yet there we were, having a religious conversation. And I should probably warn you: this is going to be a religious post. Or at least a spiritual one. I get tripped up in the terminology.

And this person, he asked me, "So what, does God speak to you then?"

And, trying to answer the question directly without first citing examples (trying because this is not something that comes naturally to me), I went big, went bold, and left the disclaimers in the dust.

"Yes".

We didn't get into it much more. I mentioned intuition. I referenced coincidence. I talked about that icky feeling you get when something isn't quite right and its peaceful counterpart when something is; a near cousin to morale conscience because sometimes the situation isn't about morals at all. All of these, I expressed, were ways that God talks to us.

And I believe in all those ways. I do. (I also understand how people might chalk them up the capacity of the human psyche. But I- personally- can't. I don't doubt that the human mind is capable of much more than we understand. Some people have faith in science, I have faith in God. Both, for me, are still a question of faith and of the choice in where to put that faith.)

The nature of the conversation however, didn't lend itself to the discussion of another way that God speaks: his own voice. Which he gets us to hear by speaking through our own voice.

I have been trying to figure a lot of things out lately. The other night, just before nodding off, I remembered vaguely something that had occurred to me on my mission. Like I was seriously half asleep already. Then, I remembered my mission journal.

On the mission, I kept a part of my journal called: "Ce que j'ai appris grace a la mission". What I've learned thanks to the mission. In it, I kept notes about what I had learned about ME. Living with another person 24 hours a day, being away from home, meeting different people. I had a colorful backdrop for 18 months against which I examined myself. And luckily, I wrote down some of my observations.

But there were also a few particular moments during my mission that I asked questions and I heard answers. As in, voiced answers. It's personal so it makes sense that I didn't share this in aforementioned conversation. I mention it here because I figure if you are reading you know me well enough to respect the disclosure. Again, the subject of these questions was me: my life. I wrote down my impressions. Honestly, they seemed out of context and didn't really make sense at all to me but I wrote them down all the same. If you could only know my lack of journal keeping during those 18 months you would realize how huge it is that I wrote any of these impressions down at all, let alone in the detail that I did.

Today, being home for the weekend, I pulled out those journals. I knew the pages I needed to flip to. And there, written in 2007 in my own hand was the advice I needed to hear-to remember because I had since forgotten-three years later to help make sense of my current questions and problems: God's voice. My words. Understood for the first time in context.

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Last night I started to reread Eat, Pray, Love. Which puts me now to 5, I think, books that I'm simultaneously reading. I still count War and Peace, though I'm pretty sure I've lost the beast of a book for good and will have to buy a new one. Anyhow, reading this book right now may not be the best idea because it will probably inspire me to abandon any responsible plans for my future in favor of traveling. Oh well.

The author, Elizabeth Gilbert, who people have told me reminds them of me (I didn't see it the first time but I'm starting to now and trying to be flattered. She did, after all, write a great book and she is funny to boot), describes the beginning of her relation with the divine. It happened in a bathroom. On the floor. Where she started to pray. Like, for the first time. Ever.

Here is the excerpt:

And so the prayer narrowed itself down to that simple entreaty-Please tell me what to do-repeated again and again. I don't know how many times I begged. I only know that I begged like someone who was pleading for her life. And the crying went on forever.

Until-quite abruptly-it stopped.

Quite abruptly, I found that I was not crying anymore. I'd stopped crying, in fact, mid-sob. My misery had been completely vacuumed out of me. I lifted my forehead off the floor and sat up in surprise, wondering if I would see now some Great Being who had taken my weeping away. But nobody was there. I was just alone. But not really alone, either. I was surrounded by something I can only describe as a little pocket of silence-a silence so rare that I didn't want to exhale for fear of scaring it off. I was seamlessly still. I don't know when I'd ever felt such stillness.

Then I heard a voice. Please don't be alarmed-it was not an Old Testament Hollywood Charles Heston voice, nor was it a voice telling me I must build a baseball field in my backyard. It was merely my own voice, speaking from within my own self. But this was my voice as I had never heard it before. This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I'd only ever experienced love and certainty in life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?

The voice said: Go back to bed, Liz.

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I'll leave the rest of the book for you to read. What can I say, I'm just a tease. I share this part because, well, isn't that how it happens?

You know, it's nice to be reminded of what is true. This weekend was a good time for that.

I won't bother to try to explain how my life has been changed thanks to going on a mission. But I can try to express gratitude that I did.
That I know the stillness.
That I kept-though not enough-a journal.
That I still maintain the habit of taking notes during church.
That I let that voice guide my pen.
That I remembered.
That things correlate.
That we can find answers now to questions we weren't asking then.
That God foresees our needs and gives us the answers we need by letting them come from us. Because that is the only way we could accept them.

And that. Is only the beginning.