God's Voice?

Originally posted on 11/6/2018 on https://jensummy.theworldrace.org/post/gods-voice-lol-what

The voice of God has always been a difficult subject for me. I remembered as a kid that people would talk about how God spoke to them and the amazing things He would tell them. I remember so vividly times I would lay in bed and just ask God to talk to me after my recited prayer (I had an ongoing list of all the things I was thankful for. There must have been nearly 100 items on there, including things like hammers and benches, because hey, those are important!). I would get so upset when I wouldn’t get an answer. Almost betrayed. I kept wondering why God wasn’t talking to me. What was I doing wrong?

Fast forward to middle school. I went to a church camp and the Holy Spirit was starting to get really real to me. I remember being around a campfire at a new music camp I was going to, instead of the camp my church went to, and there was a girl there from my old camp who joined us on a whim. She was one of my only friends that week. I knew that in the past year she had had some crazy encounters with the Holy Spirit and to be honest, I was jealous. God had no problem talking to her, and she was the same age as me. So, just sitting around this perfectly normal campfire, I start to feel so horrible that God won’t talk to me, that I just start sobbing.

Then this girl comes up to me and starts spiritually coaching me, I guess. She is praying over me and helping to comfort me. Then she says “Jen, you have to break down the walls in your mind. God wants to come in, but you won’t let Him.” I was trying so hard to get rid of those walls. I knew exactly what she was talking about, but I couldn’t. I cried out saying “I can’t. I can’t!”, but she kept praying over me. Then, my other friend starts having this crazy spiritual experience. She’s speaking words straight from God to the people around this fire, and I’m over in the corner feeling like I’ve just been hit in the head with a brick, and still nothing from God.

Fast forward only 2 months later. I end up going back to my old camp. Hooray, I have friends again! It is an incredibly Spirit-filled week and I feel my walls starting to come down. I begin to experience the Holy Spirit in ways I never had before. And finally…

God speaks to me.

We have our sacred campfire, but it’s inside by candle light. Nearly one hundred junior high-schoolers are scattered around the dining hall listening to this man usher in God’s presence. At first I sit there, thinking that there is no way God is going to talk to me. He is going to talk to everyone else in this room, but not me. But then something happens.

I feel the Holy Spirit hit me like a ton of bricks. I can’t do anything but lay on the ground, helpless. I hear everyone else in the room feel the same thing, but they express it in different ways. Some people are singing. Some people are shouting and jumping around. Some people are even praying in tongues. But I just laid on the floor. I felt the Holy Spirit coursing through my veins. I don’t think I could tell you exactly what happened in that span of an hour simply because it’s been years since its happened, but God spoke to me. God spoke to me. He revealed to me the mysteries I needed to know at that time in my life. He showed me what His power and love looked like. He showed me the people that I needed to show His love to. He showed me the power of His community and that He is not a distant entity living in the clouds, but a God who reaches down to us and speaks to us when we need to hear Him.

That summer changed my life. Anytime I was questioning my faith, or my prayers felt hollow, I would always remind myself, “You are the God who came down and touched me. You are the God with all the power in the universe, and you touched me,” and suddenly everything would make sense.

I was so happy to talk to all of my friends about how much I loved God. I would tell them that I had seen His power and I knew His love, and, maybe rightfully so, they would look at me like I was nuts. But I knew what I saw. I knew what I heard, and I wanted to share it with everyone.

And then I forgot.

I don’t think anything majorly tragic happened that caused this, but I just stopped talking about it. My faith was no longer a source of joy, but a mark of shame. I was afraid to share my story. I was afraid to be myself. After years of rejection that I shrugged off of my shoulders, that shame just slowly built up into a mountain that was suffocating me. I still went to church and I tried to do my Christian duties, but my life was too busy to do any more than that, and I forgot about that moment when God spoke to me. God started to feel more like a judgmental father in the clouds again, who I only served when it was convenient for me, which was not often.

As I became more distant from God, the enemy had more room to linger in me. At first, he would whisper the lies that I was used to hearing. The lies that I wasn’t good enough, or that I didn’t know enough. This was not new for me, and usually I could fight those lies with prayer and community, but as those things became harder to access, the lies grew, and I didn’t even notice how much they had grown until it was too late. The lies were no longer simple comparisons, but they felt like facts. I truly believed that I was worthless and that my thoughts and opinions were utterly meaningless. I believed that I was not capable of making anything good and the only thing I could do well was destruction. I felt that my voice was unworthy, and that any time someone would try to tell me otherwise they were obviously mistaken. To me, these lies didn’t seem harmful, but as a way to stay humble. The successes in my life were not of my own making, but of other people who poured into me. The things I did well had nothing to do with my skill or my talent.

I eventually learned that this was called Imposter Syndrome. It’s not as intense as it sounds, but it’s when someone genuinely believes that their accomplishments are not real and that eventually, someone will find out that they have no clue what they are doing and will expose them as a “fraud”. When I was first introduced to this concept, I was confused about why this was a “syndrome”. I really don’t know what I’m doing. I am really not the source of my success, and it tortured me because I was so confused about having to confront those things that seemed so true to me, but were in fact lies.

Fast forward to October 14th, 2018. A group of us came down to visit 2 squad mates in Nashville a day before training camp. There were 15 of us and we all went to Belonging Co. in Nashville. It was in a sketchy building in the city connected to what I think was some sort of indoor skatepark called Rocket Town. I really loved all of the people I had met so far, but those lies kept nagging at me. I knew that when I got to training camp, they were going to expose me as a fraud. They were going to find out that I wasn’t as good of a Christian as I claimed to be, and I truly believed it. Then, we began to worship that night, and while we were worshipping, I started to feel God re-enter my life. He didn’t speak to me per say, but I felt His presence surround me, as if to say “My child. Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you.” And I began to cry.

I hadn’t realized just how deep I was in the enemy’s lies until that moment. I felt like I was crossing off all of the right boxes of things good Christians should do, but I did not have a relationship with God. I was living in a transactional faith. I went to church because it made me feel good. I read my Bible because I felt like I had to, not because I wanted to. It was in that moment that I realized the gravity of the change I would be making in my life in this next year.

During training camp, I kept being reminded of those moments at church camp, and how I felt so connected to God. I remembered those moments in worship where I would stand on top of the log benches screaming with my hands in the sky, and even then I felt like I needed to give God even more. All of these moments were distant memories, though, and in those memories, I felt God calling me into a life where those experiences aren’t memories anymore, but those experiences are everyday occurrences. I have a long way to go until I get back to that place of faith that I had when I was in middle school, which seems odd to say. I have to work hard to remove the shackles that the enemy has been custom making for me for years so that I can live with complete abandon for God, the way I was meant to live.

And when I ask for God to speak to me, I no longer hear silence, but I hear a battle of words between the enemy and God, and I need to work hard to discern between those voices. I know now that this year is going to be some of the hardest work that I have ever done, but I know that it is worth it, because once I can remove my own shackles, I can help other people remove theirs. Once I can fully experience the freedom of God again, I can show that freedom to others, and I am hoping that in these next 2 months, I can lean on God, and trust that He will change my heart, and make sure that I am willing to let Him mold me into who I need to be and not who I want to be.