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Hearing God's inaudible voice
By Shirley J. Roels
Academic Dean and Director of the Lilly Vocation Project
In the Jan. 17 edition of Chimes, writer Molly Delcamp pondered Barbara Brown Taylor’s response to queries concerning God’s care about our vocational choices. Taylor recounted a time when she asked God for a response, and God’s response was “I don’t care.” Molly appreciated Taylor’s desire to relieve the weightiness of choosing between good but multiple options. However Molly then asserted that God does care about the roles and means through which we respond as prime citizens of the kingdom. Since God made us, loves us, redeems us and loves his world, he cares. So Molly concludes that, like Buechner, every once in a while we hear a whisper from God’s wings that we’ve made a right vocational choice.
Molly is right. God does care and God can whisper to let us know that he attends to our vocational directions. I believe that from my own life experience and my growing sense of mystery about how God works. Yet should we worry when we don’t hear the voice of God directly?
Let’s be cautious in presuming that the only means of hearing God is his audible voice. Why? First, because being imperfect creatures, our hearing is flawed. In the cacophony of daily sound we may not hear the intended message. It is possible that when God says “Study”, we hear “Party.” Second, such a limited framework feeds our greatest fear, namely that God didn’t speak because he’s abandoned us. When our only frame for discerning God’s will is his direct voice, we can take the wrong path or become paralyzed and hopeless. Can we counter our deafness or God’s seeming silence when our only resource is the direct voice of God?
Yet God does not leave his faithful followers without communication, even when the whisper is not present. First, he gives us the Scriptures to explain our role as his new people and his expectations for the sanctified Christian life. We already know from Scripture that God calls us to care for the poor, love the stranger, use creation carefully and participate in the daily dying and rising of the Christian life. This too is his clear message to us.
Second, our Creator talks to us through the people he has made, a human community of Christians and non-Christians that help us find God’s way. Through common grace non-Christians often assist our path, and within the saved community Christians are frequently God’s voice to us. God uses them to identify our talents, encourage certain curiosities and help us discover the needs we should fill. Perhaps a sixth grade teacher identified you as spiritually thoughtful. Maybe your youth group leader noted your great entrepreneurial instincts. A parent, yours or someone else’s, suggested that you had an obvious interest in children or nature. God uses the human community to raise us up as his people. Teachers, parents, neighbors can be and often are his voices.
God can also use human messengers to send us unanticipated notes. When we aren’t selected for a role to which we aspire, others are probably helping us discern when our aspirations and a particular locus for contributing to God’s world don’t mesh. Maybe they perceive that we aren’t ready. Maybe the time or place is not the best match for what’s needed in this organization or community. Though our disappointment may take years to process, in hindsight we may recognize wisdom in the collective choices that propelled us onto unexpected but important byways.
Finally, people help us recognize that prime citizenship in the kingdom is sometimes simple duty within a community, whether it’s glamorous or not. When after six years, my church needed to replace the couple who’d served coffee after the morning service, others needed to answer the call to duty. In the church where hospitality matters, serving coffee is not a likely place where your deep gladness meets the world’s great need. Yet coffee service is a task to which someone must attend. We can’t always be so busy with profound vocational callings that we disregard the simple needs in front of us.
Yes, I agree with Molly. God does care about your vocational responses, in both the paid and unpaid tasks of the Christian life, and sometimes God speaks to us individually. Yet remember that discerning your calling in life is part of a much broader fabric that includes the messages of Scripture and life in the human community. So open your ears and your hearts to the Word and to our fellow human travelers. They too can represent God’s care for your calling.
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