How can I hear God?

How can I hear God?

It’s a perennial question, and one that I explore in 7 Ways to Pray, my book coming out this autumn. Yesterday I had a delightful little experience of hearing God that helps in pondering how God speaks to his children.

Yesterday was a bit of a mess—and today will be too, I fear. I woke this morning and looked over to the clock but it wasn’t lit up, meaning that half of the house is without electricity. Including the hot water and heat (please do pray that we can get an electrician in to sort it out today!). Yesterday the electrics went out yesterday twice, and both times the desktop computer I was using died (but thankfully I didn’t lose too much work). Of course the wifi router is plugged into the half of the house shrouded in darkness. Then last night one of the kids’ beds broke, so we had to disassemble it and put the guest bed in there until we can get another one.

The hassles of life, right? We all know and experience them. But the timing for these hassles isn’t great as I need to submit the rewrites on my two books this week and next.

So in the backdrop of these distractions and the kids trying to stream online school with wifi that was going out and me being on a couple of video calls and also trying to make lots of progress on the rewriting, I wasn’t anticipating receiving from God my word for the year (a spiritual practice I write about here). But that’s what happened, to my delight. Hearing God can take us by surprise—we don’t control the experience but when we keep our ears and hearts open to God, we put ourselves in a position to receive.

I had an article published with Our Daily Bread yesterday, and thus was interacting on their website with the comments about the article. One of the comments was this:

My daughter felt God leading her to get a tattoo of the word ABIDE. The woman doing the tattoo asked what that meant and she was able to tell her redemption story! May Your children all abide in You, Lord. Let us tell Your story of love and grace! Amen.

As I replied I had a flash of insight:

Abide is such a good word. We abide in Christ; we abide in His word. Hmmm… thank you! Maybe this is to be my word for the year! I’m going to pray about that!

I asked God for confirmation, but I also sensed within a quick yes, abide is my word for 2021. It was a deep feeling of knowing that this was God’s answer. I hadn’t set out to hear God on this yesterday; it was his gift of love. But since the beginning of the year I have been expectant, wondering when God might answer my desire.

How do you communicate with God? Does my experience resonate with you?

One of the chapters in 7 Ways to Pray explores hearing God. I will be sharing more about the release of this book in my monthly newsletter. To receive it, click here.