What does it mean to hear from God? I feel like this is a question I have had a lot recently as I talk with people about fixing our eyes on him and allowing him to lead the everyday parts of of lives and not just the “big” things. I was thinking about this as I drank my coffee on the porch this morning, because as I was praying through a particular situation this sudden peace came over me, and I knew not only had he heard, but he spoke hope to me in it.

Normally my brain is a whirlwind of ADHD chaos. It’s filled with thoughts, ideas, and plans – and backup plans, and backup plans for my backup plans. It’s filled with a million musings of what sounds like fun and who I want to experience that with and how we can make it work. It’s rumbling with the uncertainty of how to repair a broken relationship and why it even got to that point in the first place. It’s thinking through the schedules of not just me, but my family and all the people I work with and who I need to check in with, complete a task for, and lift in prayer. It’s filled with the realization that for some people I am too much and for others I am not enough and it never seems to be that I am just the right amount. It’s questioning my every thought and motive.

Often there’s shame mixed in because of the “should haves” and “could haves” along with some arrogance because of the “Well, I would haves.” There’s grief and laughter and confusion and joy, but most of the time it is all so intermingled that if I tried to type it out it would look like the first draft of this jumbled blog that I quickly tapped out on my phone with fat fingers that had so many typos I couldn’t translate some of it.

But then there’s those moments.

The times where suddenly everything is still and quiet inside, and I know he has entered and heard. There’s clarity, peace. It seems obvious and a weight lifts that makes me know, yeah – this is him. The one who says his yoke is easy and his burden is light. The one who came to seek and save the lost and loved us while we were still his enemies. The one in whose image we are created and and in whose image we are being sanctified and transformed to be more like each day. Jesus has spoken. The Spirit is here.

That’s how I know it’s him – when he calms the storm that is a constant in my heart and mind and reveals himself to me through the peace that passes all understanding. Sometimes the stillness is a brief moment, and the clarity seems fleeting. Other times I rest in the gift of a season of knowing and being confident in that knowledge. But even in the biggest turmoil and the most broken times I can live in the truth that God, whose word formed all of creation, speaks to me in personal, intimate ways filled with power and hope.

Amen! How do you hear him?