Rhema

Warning: very long blog ahead. You might want to go and get a coffee, then make yourself comfortable. If you’re just popping in because you have a couple of minutes to spare, you might want to come back later. Or not. It’s totally up to you. I don’t mind either way. I probably wouldn’t want to read my crap either.

My friend Nick has a blog that I read fairly regularly. The topics he chooses to write about are interesting and varied, and sometimes he poses questions to his readers and asks for comments. Here is a question that he asked recently:

“I am very keen to hear what you think about God's voice. Have you ever had an experience of God speaking personally to you? How does He do it? What did He say? Have you ever heard people say ridiculous things in the name of God? What did they say and what did it make you think?”

Yes, I have had an experience of God speaking personally to me. A few, actually. I value those experiences a lot, and I hope I never forget a single one. Nick’s question is a good opportunity for me to reflect on some of those experiences, so I thought I may as well jot a few of them down while I was at it. Here they are, as best as I can remember, in rough chronological order.

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“GO!”

I was seventeen years old, living in a total dive in Aileen Crescent, Burnie. Anyone who knows Burnie at all will know the flats I’m talking about – on the corner of Mount Street and Aileen Crescent – not the ones that have been painted white, but the ones with the vacant block of land in front of it. It looks like a block of apartments, and perhaps it is now, but when I lived there back in 1996 it was a bunch of smelly one-room bedsits with shared toilets, showers and laundry facilities, inhabited mainly by middle-aged alcoholic men. And me. I was the only girl. I’d recently dropped out of college so that I could work at McDonalds full time. I couldn’t survive on Austudy, and I was too young to have a license, so I couldn’t get to college anyway. Even when I turned 17, I didn’t have a car or anyone to teach me to drive. Working full time at McDonalds paid $160 a week. My bedsit cost $55 per week to rent.

The guy in the room next to mine was nice enough during the day when I passed him in the hallway, but of a night he would usually get drunk and watch western movies. I know this because the wall that my bed was against was the same wall that his TV was against on the other side. He would watch these movies until at least midnight. I’d be trying to sleep, and all I could hear was “POW-POW! Gallop-gallop-gallop-gallop… POW! POW-POW-POW!” Sometimes, if it was really loud, I’d knock on the wall. To begin with, he’d turn it down a bit. But after a while, he must’ve been tired of me ruining his fun, because he stopped caring. He wouldn’t turn it down. Instead, he’d yell “FUCK YOU!” back through the wall at me.

One night, it was pretty bad. I had to start work at 5:30 the next morning for an open shift. This meant getting up at around 4:30, because I had to factor in the half an hour that it took to walk to work. The guy’s TV was turned up louder than ever, and I’d already knocked and pleaded through the wall at him, to no avail. I had been a Christian for only a few weeks. I remember crying, and praying with all my heart that the guy would turn off his TV so that I could get some sleep. Suddenly, God spoke back to me. Audibly. I heard a loud voice speaking urgently in my ear – “GO!”
Confused, I replied, “What?” The voice spoke again, with even more urgency. “GO!!”

I wasn’t really sure what it meant, but obediently I got out of bed and went to my door. At exactly the same time, the guy in the next room got up and went to his door too. We met in the hallway. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but all sorts of words tearfully poured out as I explained to him that I had to work in a few hours, and I was sorry to ruin his fun, and I knew we all had to live in close proximity, but could he please turn his TV down so that I could get some sleep. He looked at me, stunned. “I am so sorry,” he replied, looking ashamed, “I had no idea. I’ll turn it down straight away. I’m really sorry”. He walked back into his room, and turned it down so low I couldn’t even hear it. For the remainder of my time there, I never had to ask him to turn it down again.

I had never heard God’s voice audibly before that night, and I don’t recall hearing that clearly since.

“He’s a Pharisee”

I was attending a church in Burnie, and I’d just become (rather forcibly) involved in the music team. I was at a practice one night, and I was watching the worship leader sing. Something about him rang alarm bells. He just didn’t seem genuine. At all. I really felt that the guy was hiding something, that he wasn’t being totally honest. I remember trying to shake the feeling, thinking “what would I know? I’m only a new Christian, and this guy is an elder in the church!” I told God I was sorry for thinking things like that about such an upstanding member of his kingdom.
“Why on earth would I be thinking things like that about this guy, God?” I asked.
“He’s a Pharisee!” he replied.

I was stunned! This wasn’t an audible voice like before, but rather a strong, resounding thought in my head. I knew it was God for two reasons. Firstly, it definitely wasn’t a thought I would have had myself. Secondly, it would not go away. It rang around and around in my mind, like the reverberation of a gong. I couldn’t make sense of the information. A Pharisee? What did he mean? Why would he have told me that? I didn’t know. But I knew it was true. The guy was a Pharisee. He was putting on an outward appearance to hide something. The inside of his heart did not match his actions.

About a week later, the guy in question got up in front of the congregation and admitted that he’d been having a six-month long affair with the wife of a friend of his, who also attended the church. He stepped down from eldership, and no longer sang on the music team. His marriage was eventually repaired, but the marriage of the other couple was completely ruined.

I’m still not sure why God felt the need to tell me that about him, but I think it was to help me to learn to trust my instincts, no matter how unlikely they might seem. It was definitely a skill that I’d need for the future.

“YES!”

Since leaving home in 1995, I hadn’t had much success with accommodation. I lived with a friend for six months, until she asked me to leave because she felt I was invading her space. Then I lived with my grandparents, but for various reasons that hadn’t worked out either. Then I lived in the bedsit on Aileen Crescent until I moved into a slightly nicer place with my cousin. My brand new shiny ‘full-on-for-the-Lord’ lifestyle (which I cringe about now, thanks for asking) was in constant conflict with her new-found lesbianism. To top it all off, my pregnant 15 year old sister was sleeping on a camp mattress in my bedroom, for lack of anywhere else to live. I guess it was a recipe for disaster, but whatever the reason, my sister got up in the middle of the night to empty her pregnant bladder, and came face to face with my cousin, standing at my bedroom door with a knife, trying to gather up the courage to come in and stab me with it. So I figured it was time to move out of there, even though I knew in my heart I should stay put. I was offered temporary board with a lady I worked with. I moved in, but it soon became obvious that her and her husband were used to their own space, and tension started to build there too.

I was a bit of a broken mess by this time, without a skerrick of self confidence or trust left in me. It was then that I met a couple at the church I went to. They seemed lovely. They not only offered me a place to stay, but they professed to genuinely love and care for me “as a daughter”. I drank it in. Nobody had ever said that sort of stuff to me before. I desperately wanted it to be true, even though all sorts of alarm bells were going off inside me. I moved in, went back to college to finish year 11 and 12, and tried to feel happy and secure.

It gradually became evident that the couple I was living with could be fairly manipulative and controlling. They would have ‘talks’ to me about "my behaviour" whenever I showed any sort of emotion other than forced happiness. They drew up a list of chores around the house to "keep it fair" – my workload didn’t seem entirely fair to me, but I did it all, for fear of the consequences. They generally treated me like I was a lot younger than I actually was – they even insisted on hiring a babysitter to look after me when they went away for a couple of weeks. By this stage I was nineteen, and I had lived out of home long enough to look after myself, thanks very much, but they paid no heed to my protests. Both of them were constantly unwell, and their health seemed to rule everything they did. None of my friends liked visiting, because the atmosphere in the house was so strange.

Then things just got weird. The guy started spending a lot of time chatting to me, even massaging me, and it was getting a bit too close for comfort. Then the woman stopped talking to me. She wouldn’t tell me why, only that “I should know”. Of course, looking back, as an older and wiser version of me, I’m guessing that the two were connected, but at the time I was completely oblivious. One day they went out to the paddock next door (where I couldn’t hear them) and had a screaming argument. After that, the guy wouldn’t talk to me either, sticking with the “you should know” explanation whenever I asked what I had done wrong. I was completely confused, and totally miserable. There was more tension in the household than in any other I had experienced. I’d walk into a room, and she would walk straight out of it, slamming the door behind her. She stopped cooking meals for me. I wrote her a letter, imploring her to tell me what I’d done wrong, and I found it balled up in her room when I went in there to vacuum. I felt like I was going insane. I really did. I felt like I was missing something completely obvious. But even in the middle of it all, I was still terrified at the thought of losing this new ‘family’, the only ones who I thought had ever really cared about me. Even though in my mind I knew it was ridiculous, the things they said and did made me feel like I could never survive on my own again. They had this crazy hold over me.

In the middle of all this confusion, I went into my room one day and prayed. It had been quite a while since I’d allowed myself to talk to God with a totally open heart and mind, because I was terrified that he would tell me I should move on. But I knew I had to hear the truth.
“God, please tell me what I should do. Should I move out?” I asked, screwing my eyes up in anticipation of what he might say.
“YES!” came the resounding reply.
I opened my eyes. All of a sudden, I felt at peace. For the first time in months, I felt like me again. I knew he was right. I had to leave this insane environment. I knew I was strong enough. I’d done it before, and I could do it again.

I went and told the couple that I was moving out. They were ecstatic. A week before, this would have devastated me. Now, I didn’t care. Predictably, they insisted on orchestrating the whole thing, finding me a flat, helping move my furniture, etc. I agreed, more to keep the peace than anything. They were going away for a couple of weeks, and they decided that when they returned, we would all go looking at flats together.

While they were on holiday, I decided that I was perfectly capable of going to look at places myself, so off I went. The very first flat I looked at was perfect. I signed the lease the next day, and got some friends together to help me move all my stuff. I thought the couple would be proud of me for organising things without the need for their help. I was wrong. They weren’t happy at all. It was like if they couldn’t do it their way, then they wanted no part of it. Fortunately, I no longer cared what they thought. I was free!

A couple of weeks after I moved out, I was handed a letter at church by a small child, from the couple. They wouldn’t even give it to me in person. I read the letter, and nearly fell apart again. It accused me of purposely introducing a virus to their computer while they’d been away, short changing them for board, and for not paying them back some money they’d lent me about six months earlier. All up, including repairs to their computer, they calculated that I owed them around five hundred dollars. The letter stated that they knew full well how much I earned, and they wouldn’t be taking repayment in measly instalments, thank you. They figured I could afford ten repayments of $50 per fortnight until this debt was repaid in full.

I was floored. I showed the letter to a friend, who happened to be an elder in the church. He took the letter away from me and said that he’d deal with it. I later found out that there was quite a file of these sorts of letters from this couple to various people, and that they’d been spoken to before about the same sort of thing. My elder friend told me that this couple were very money focused, and that they wouldn’t let the issue rest until they’d been repaid, even though I knew full well I didn’t owe them anything. The elder and the pastor ended up paying the couple the five hundred dollars out of their own money, just to shut them up.

I still can’t believe it came to that. I wish I still had a copy of the letter, just to remind myself how bloody ridiculous it was. I have barely spoken to them since, which suits me just fine. I can’t believed how sucked in I was, and I’m very grateful to God for getting me the hell out of there.

“K”

It was 1999. I was halfway through Year 12. I was lying in bed one night, thinking about where I’d been, and where I was going. I felt like I had come a long way from the empty shell I was a few years earlier. I was still a bit of an emotional cripple, but for the first time in my life, I felt that I could perhaps give something of myself to someone else. Perhaps I could actually have a functional relationship. It was a novel concept, maybe even absurd. Nevertheless, those were my thoughts that night.

“God, I think I want to get married. Who should I marry?” I asked, a bit tongue-in-cheek.
“K” came the unmistakeable voice, echoing over and over again in my mind.
“WHAT!?” I mentally screeched back at him, “you’ve got to be JOKING! You are joking, right? K is the LAST guy on EARTH I would want to marry! Please tell me you’re joking. Please don’t make me marry K. PLEASE!”
Silence.
Man. I was freaked out. K was this annoying desperado who had been chasing me for a couple of years. I had never been interested in him in that way. Besides, he was at bible college in Adelaide, supposedly having the time of his life. It seemed unlikely that he’d move back to Tasmania. Even if he did, I knew for sure that I didn’t want to marry him. I convinced myself that I’d heard incorrectly. It can’t have been God. He wouldn’t want me to marry someone I didn’t love. There is no way it was him. It couldn’t have been. I pushed down my nagging doubts, and stuck to my ‘I must have misheard’ theory.

Well, to cut a long story short, K came to stay about six months later during his Christmas break. He was a different guy. Completely different. Confident, sure of himself, funny, caring. He didn’t seem to mind what I thought of him, he was just happy being him. I liked that. We hung out together every day. He asked me to marry him when we were at the beach one day, just after Christmas. I freaked out, and told him to ask me in a couple of years, because I wasn’t ready. But then I remembered what God had said to me a few months earlier. It all started to make sense. I realised I didn’t want to lose K from my life. I had no idea whether or not I loved him, but I knew that marrying him was the right thing to do. So I said yes.

I wouldn’t recommend our courtship methods to everyone, but it worked for us. Marrying him was the best thing I ever did. He’s exactly the sort of person I want to share my life with, and I love him with all my heart.

The Odometer Vision

I’d been involved in the aforementioned church for a number of years, and some of the stuff that went on there was starting to take its toll. K and I had been running the youth group for nearly five years, and we were burned out. As a solution, the leadership of the church appointed someone else, and told us we were no longer required. We were very hurt. All we’d wanted was a break of a few weeks, and perhaps some frigging support – not too much to ask, surely? Apparently it was. I turned up at a youth leadership meeting, and was made to feel like a leper. I walked out, and cried the whole way home.

Around the same time, the music team that had been so desperate to have me as a fresh-faced 17 year old told me that they no longer felt I was suitable for the role. According to the elder in charge of music, I had “issues”. I needed to resolve these “issues” before I would be welcome to sing in church again. I asked what the “issues” were, and he was unable to come up with a concrete answer. It was the vibe, really. Just… you know… the vibe. Apparently, I wasn’t worshipping properly. Other singers shut their eyes and raised their hands, and I didn’t do that. Why not? What was wrong with me? I told him it felt fake, like I was putting on a show. He shook his head despairingly.
“Well then Rebecca, why do you come to church?” he asked.
“To see people. To hang out with other Christians. Not necessarily to sing, or talk to God. I can do that anywhere,” I replied.
“Well you see, that’s the very reason why you can’t be on the music team any more!” he earnestly explained, telling me that he put the church before everything, even before his family. Oh. My. Goodness. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the slightest bit biblical. But what the fuck would I know? He was the elder, not me. From then on, I was relegated to overhead projectionist.

Turning up for my shift on projection one Sunday morning, I was feeling pretty low. I was sick to death of the whole thing. I’d seen so much behind-the-scenes bullshit that I was pretty much convinced that the church as I knew it had the totally wrong end of the stick. Surely this wasn’t what God was like? I’d heard he was accepting, not judgmental. Was I supposed to pretend I was in some sort of perfect place while I got my shit together? Here was me thinking that I’d be accepted, warts and all, wherever I happened to be in life. Silly me. For the first time since I’d become a Christian, I started to entertain the idea that I might not actually be in the wrong for once. That it might be them, not me. The very notion shocked me, but didn’t seem at all implausible. In fact, it made perfect sense.

So, I asked God what he thought. During one of the scheduled-yet-spontaneous patches of waffling on where the projector was not required, I shut my eyes and asked him, “What am I DOING here? Is this all just a pile of crap? Where are you in all of this?”
A vision popped up behind my closed eyelids. It was a car odometer. I watched with interest as the numbers on the odometer clicked over rapidly, getting to a few hundred, then it would reset itself to zero. This happened over and over. The numbers never reached more than a couple of thousand before the reset button would be pushed and the odometer would read zero again.
“What does this mean?” I asked him, slightly amused.
“Every time you come back to this place,” he replied, “I have to reset your odometer to zero.”
I opened my eyes. I knew I had to leave that church. And not go back.

So I did. And I’ve never regretted it. I discarded everything I’d been taught there, figuring that if it was true, then it would show itself to be true without it being drummed repeatedly into my psyche. I’ve learned more about God, more about myself, more about people, and more about life in general than I ever did while I was doing the ‘normal’ Christian church thing. I still find it amusing that God would tell someone to leave a church in order to have a better relationship with him. But I’m very glad he did.

“It’s just a job”

This one still hurts a lot, so I’ll be brief. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before anyway. In 2007, I had a very stressful job that I loved and stupidly gave my whole self to. The company went under, and I asked God where my future lay with them – should I go, or should I stay?
“It’s just a job. Remember that.” he said.
So I went into work, repeating his words over and over in an attempt to detach myself from caring so much. The next day I got fired.

I know I should listen to what he said, but I just can’t seem to stop it hurting. He was right. It was just a job. I’ll just keep telling myself that, and maybe one day it won’t hurt any more.

“You have let yourself go”

This was in around August last year. I was lying in bed one night, and I asked him to tell me something I needed to hear.
“You have let yourself go” came his familiar voice, resonating in my mind.
Immediately, I began to wholeheartedly agree with him – he is God after all, and he’s been right all those other times. But then I realised I had no idea what he actually meant by that. Was he referring to my blubbery physique? To my gradually developing indifference to pretty much everything? I have thought about this comment often since then, but I still have no idea. Of course, I probed him for more information, but nothing. Nada. Ideas and suggestions are most welcome.

“Which way is home?”

After an unrelated rant to him one night late last year (again, while lying in bed), my mind was swiftly transported to a place on the Bass Highway just outside of Elizabeth Town, kind of near the big apple orchard. I somehow knew that this was the halfway point between Burnie and Launceston. It was so random, and it had nothing to do with whatever I was whingeing to him about at the time. So I asked him, “What am I doing here?”
He replied with a question of his own. “Which way is home?”
I was stumped. I looked towards Burnie, and then towards Launceston. Which way was home? Suddenly it was obvious how much I had been holding on to my ‘old’ life on the coast. I had not fully moved on. I realised I had to commit to one or the other. I said to him, “This better not be some not-so-subtle way of saying I should move back to Burnie, because that is NOT something I want to do”. I sensed that it wasn’t. Just that I had to decide to fully move on.

So I did. Driving back to Launnie after the Burnie carols, for the first time I felt like I was driving home. I knew I’d have to give up my involvement in things like the carols, because it was holding on to that old life, and I wouldn’t be able to completely move on while I was doing that. But I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them. As it turns out, I didn’t have to. I was sent a ‘thank you’ card from the organiser, informing me in a very chummy ‘no hard feelings’ kind of way that the carols was changing, and that they would be “giving me a rest this year”. Haha. I guess if I wasn’t going to do it, then someone else would do it for me. You’d think I’d have learned to listen by now, eh.

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Now that I look back over it, there’s a bit of a pattern in all of that. More often than not, he seems to speak to me during times of change in my life. I’m not sure whether to be pleased, or scared about what he’ll say next.

Getting back to Nick’s original question, of course I have heard people say ridiculous things in the name of God. Many, many times. It’s the main reason why I’m where I’m at as far as church goes. I reckon there’ll be a lot of people with a shitload of explaining to do when the time comes. No doubt I’ll be one of them.

There’s not much I can do about that now, though. All I can do is to continue to try and be genuine in all I say and do.