I was out running errands last week with Bruce my perpetual wingman (He’s my yellow lab/some-kind-of-shepherd dog that God gave me this past year—I’ll write about him sometime soon) which caused me to drive an hour across Austin to pick up some weight plates for weightlifting. I started getting back into more intentional exercise just under two years ago, mainly running and calisthenic workouts, but more recently started including weights as well.
One of the few nice things about being in a city is that you can easily find people selling used items for great prices, and I was able to pick up weights that would have cost hundreds of dollars elsewhere. But I digress. In the middle of all of that, I was getting ready to head back home and had thought I was coming up on a good place to stop and let Bruce out to walk around a little bit before we drove the hour home, but I was wrong. I was talking to the Lord about this and He spoke to my heart or mind or inside my head or however one wants to word that, to take the next left. And this is where the dialogue began and He began to speak to me about deepening my trust in Him by hearing His voice.
My guess is that many of us have been here at various points in time. God is talking to us, we aren’t sure if we are hearing Him or something else, and we’re struggling to trust that it’s actually God. I’ve been in charismatic-and-beyond circles for about 22 years now, and while at first it was a huge struggle to know if I was hearing God or my own thoughts or whatever else, 22 years later it is definitely less of a struggle, but it isn’t challenge-free. To complicate things further, what I didn’t know when I began hearing His voice but have discovered since then is that in addition to God, angels, and demons, fragmented parts of our own souls can speak to us much like how we hear God, which makes discerning who and what voice we are hearing all the more important (for more info, check out my coauthored book Broken to Whole, in print and newly released on audiobook this past week!)
Anyway, since the Lord (or at least what I thought was Him) was telling me to take the next left and I would find a good place to stop and take Bruce for a walk, I was looking for left-hand-turns. I was a bit outside of the city in the hill country at this point, so drove for a good minute and still didn’t pass a left turn. I did, however, see a great place over to my right and began to talk to Him about that. That was when He asked me the question “Why do you struggle to trust me so much?”
It’s a great question. And I don’t entirely know. I mean, if we think about it, God is the only person in the cosmos who is truly worthy of 100% of our trust. He’s literally the only one who never fails us, never disappoints us, never lets us down, never ditches us, and never does us wrong. Now, some reading this may be saying “That’s not true, God has let me down plenty of times.” I would strongly suggest that He hasn’t—you simply think He has because of a lack of understanding about who God is, how He works, and the rules He put into place that govern the cosmos. The Bible says in Hosea 4:6, “My people perish for lack of knowledge” for a reason, and sometimes what we don’t know can and does hurt us. God has never failed us—but we have failed ourselves with unrealistic expectations, assuming things He never said, expecting God do to things or work in specific ways He didn’t tell us He was going to do, attributed failures and disobedience of other people as being God’s fault, and more.
And in truth, that right there is probably the answer to why I struggle to trust God—not because He is actually unworthy of my trust because again, He is the only one fully worth of it in every circumstance, but because of things I believe about how worthy He is or is not. In other words, I need to take some time with Him and ask Him to reveal the hidden places in my heart where I received pain as a result of my own misunderstandings and all of the parts of me carrying that hidden pain and doubt.
As it turned out, the really great place to my right actually was a terrible place to stop. You see, it really did look fantastic at first, but it’s almost like God knew something I didn’t and was wanting me to trust Him with a simple instruction so He could prove to me that He is trustworthy. What I didn’t know because I couldn’t see around the next bend until I drove it, was that this “great place” was just inside a gated area that I absolutely would not have access to. Well, clearly that wasn’t it, so I kept driving and kept looking for a driveway or pull-off to my left. I went up and down a few more hills and was coming up on an intersection, at which point I was starting to wonder if I was going to end up driving on some wild goose chase with directions I was making up for myself down random roads in opposite directions from where I was wanting to go. No, as it turns out, just before the intersection there was another turn into a hotel parking lot.
Still not sure what was going to happen, I recognized that this was a fairly low-risk proposition to begin with. If I was wrong, then all I had to do was turn around and get back on the road. But if I was right and what God said was true, then maybe it would be a good place to let Bruce out for a bit.
It was a GREAT place! (The featured image is another picture I took of the place). You see, behind the hotel was this dog-walking path they had created for exactly that purpose. It even had a trashcan at the entrance to the path stocked with little doggie-sized bags for cleaning up after your pet. We spent about ten minutes there on this really short path. He sniffed just about everything in sight, marked half of what was visible (I swear dogs have an extra bladder in their body somewhere they just store up for special occasions like this), and had a good time. Then, we got back in my truck and drove home.
It was an interesting learning opportunity for me. This was a really simple opportunity for God to show me that deep down I obviously have mistrust and distrust of Him that I really need to address. And because He is kind and good, He took a simple opportunity to reveal that to me while also helping me take good care of Bruce. And God is pretty cool like that—He cares about Bruce more than I do, and He knows that helping me take care of the little man is also a way He can show me love too—all while revealing some hidden things in my heart too.
I encourage anyone reading this to take a moment and ask God to begin to reveal things in your heart that He wants to bring attention to. As He does this, take some time and ask Him some questions about the “why” and “how” behind it—why is that issue there, how did it get there, and how do you need to address it to fix it? And if you’re new to hearing God’s voice and aren’t sure how to, I recommend you pick up a copy of my friend Praying Medic’s book “Hearing God’s Voice Made Simple” or Ivan Roman’s book “The Heart of the Prophetic”. You can also get a copy of “God Speaks”, an anthology by Praying Medic that I contributed to which shares a wide range of perspectives and experiences on hearing God. I am also including a few links below to other articles I have written on this subject that you will likely find helpful.
