God Hears

I love the LORD because he HEARS.

BECAUSE he HEARS, I will PRAY.

(my paraphrase of Psalm 116:1-2)

I was crying this morning because I felt like maybe I am not where God wants me to be. Or who God wants me to be. Maybe I treat God too much like a genie in a bottle. Maybe all my love for him is based on the fact that he answers my prayers. Like a child.  I like him because he gives me things. Maybe my faith isn’t in HIM, but in the things I am getting from him.  Maybe my faith isn’t real. Maybe I am praying wrong. I hear that condemnation and it is unliftable.  I cannot move this condemnation from my back.

Then my friend sends me a text:

“I love the Lord for he heard my voice; he heard my cry for mercy. Because he listened, I will pray as long as I have breath.” Psalm 116:1-2

The words rolled away like water off a duck’s back.  I didn’t hear.  I didn’t really read it. I was too numb, too distracted by the weight of condemnation I was carrying.

“READ IT AGAIN” God whispers to my heart.

New words JUMPED off the page in the way only He can do.  It is like He highlights for me.

I love the lord BECAUSE HE HEARD MY VOICE.

David is saying he loves the Lord because he feels heard by the Lord.  Yes David, me too. Me too. This is my testimony. I knew OF God my whole life growing up, but I started to LOVE God, and to know God himself, when I started to really pray.  I always felt God was BIG, powerful, and mighty. But small and intimate? Like a friend? No. Why would the GOD OF THE UNIVERSE care what I am longing for, hoping for, and just want to hear my daily thoughts?

In 2012 I joined a Moms in Prayer group and it was the first time I had ever prayed non-scripted prayers, with others, out loud. It was terrifying. But you know what was more terrifying? Sending my first born child into the world of public school at the age of 5. I was certain public school had wolves around every corner. Or at least children who would introduce my child to horrific things like cursing and drugs. Yes, I think I really was imaging that public school had tiny drug dealers in the kindergarten class. If not that, there was certainly bald men with white vans giving away candy in the parking lot. I wasn’t sure exactly, I hadn’t been to public school, but I knew it couldn’t be good.

The fear of public school outweighed the fear of praying out loud, unscripted prayers, with strangers, so when I heard the organization called “Moms in Prayer” being advertised on the Christian radio station, I jumped on the opportunity to join a group and pray for my daughter each week.

As we prayed each week for my child and other’s children, I felt my inner cynic really taking over my thought life. Wonderful god-loving women, who were nothing but kind to me as I stammered out my first out-loud prayer, “God help my daughter”, would pray all sorts of things that surprised me. They weren’t praying for their child not to take drugs or candy, or even for God to protect their child from death. They were praying for small, normal, every day things. “God help my child do his best on his math test today. Can you please help him remember all the answers he studied?”

What? I might have rolled my eyes. Lady, God is busy keeping children alive in Africa and putting rapists in prison, why does he care or want to help with your kids’ math test? Don’t you know how BUSY God is? I thought were were here just to ask for the big stuff? God is BUSY.

The next week each mother would show up reporting of how God had helped, how he had answered their prayers. How he cared about the big AND the small things in our lives. Week after week. I was shocked. I was dumbfounded. I didn’t understand. God is big and busy, isn’t he?

That was one of the significant times in my life when I was realizing how God was nothing like my father on earth. God wasn’t annoyed to hear what was on my heart. God wasn’t too busy reading the newspaper to help me with my little desires. He doesn’t want his children to be “seen and not heard” as my father did. He started to show me that the God I thought I knew was much smaller, weaker, and more unkind than the God that He actually is.

God would hear me, and I felt heard. 

He hears me. He HEARS me.  He hears ME. So much of my life I felt unheard. As the youngest of 7 children I don’t remember feeling like I had much of a voice. It wasn’t that my house was loud, with a father who was most definitely on the Autism spectrum, our house was almost always closer to dead quiet than it was to loud. The phrase “children are to be seen and not heard” was not a phrase that was explicitly said, but the spirit of it definitely lived in my home growing up.

But I know I have always been someone with something to say. As a child I was a good student, but I got in trouble for talking more than any other kid in the class. My 5th grade year my teacher Mrs. Schroder had us write out the Gettysburg Address every time we were too loud or caught talking when we shouldn’t have been. Guess who memorized the Gettysburg Address by the end of her 5th grade year? Guess who won the award for having written it the most times? A rowdy boy? Nope. It was yours truly.

I have always wanted to be heard.

When I transitioned from working mom to stay at home mom, it was the second time my voice became of very little value to the world. I felt it. Have you felt that too? Walk into a restaurant wearing a suit and high heels and that server will jump to make sure you have the best experience of your life. But walk into that same restaurant with baby on your hip, it is the quickest way to become invisible. A sure-fire way to become unheard.

There has been many seasons of my life where I have felt like I had something to say but the world didn’t hear, my friend didn’t hear, my husband didn’t hear, my child didn’t hear me. But MY GOD? He ALWAYS HEARS ME. God hears.

Yes David.  Me too.

I love the lord because he hears me.

Because he hears me, I will pray. As long as I have breath, I will pray.

God hears you too.

(from my journal written 2017)