Saturday, January 21, 2012

A Whisper to a Scream (It’s more than just a song from the 80s)

Love comes, down upon us
Til you flow like water
Burning, with the hope of insight
- (A Whisper to a Scream ~ The Icicle Works)

My church family has joined together to start 2012 off with 21 days of fasting and prayer. I started 2012 in the midst of emotions that I wasn’t quite able to put my finger on…emotions I knew if I didn’t get a hold of, would lead me down a path back to a place I didn’t want to visit. So I asked God to show me the things, people, places, situations that were distracting me.

The thing that I’ve found about my relationship with God is that I hear Him whisper to me all the time. A “don’t forget that bag” as I walk out of the house, that I grab without thinking…only to find I needed something in it several hours later. Sometimes it’s a word like “all in” that I find myself hearing and then sharing with a friend who needed to hear just that. Sometimes the whisper is a scripture that I have no idea why I’m being lead to until I’m reading it and knowing exactly why.

The thing about a fast, though, is that it seems those whispers become screams. As I press into Him, spend time in prayer and in the Word, His whispers sound like screams in my head. They are louder. They are clearer. And unlike a whisper that you can try not to hear…there’s no ‘not hearing’ a scream.

But even as I write this, I hear my Heavenly Father remind me…”am I screaming? Or are you just listening better? Have you cut out the people, and the things and the distractions that make My voice more easily heard?”

Yep.