A few weeks ago I was greeted with some lower left back pain.  We had just gotten done cutting wood where I was carrying some stumps, so I just assumed I had pulled a lower back muscle.  When the pain intensified, I was perplexed, but it was a weekend so I thought I’d just take some Tylenol and wait it out.

After a really good back massage by my husband, the pain quit and I slept well and thought it was taken care of.  About mid-morning the next day, Sunday, the back pain started coming back.  By early afternoon there was also abdominal pain.  We had some left over hydrocodone from a child’s earlier script, and I took one.  About an hour later I took another.  Nothing seemed to help.  The pain was as intense as labor pains and I had now begun vomiting.  We began to suspect a kidney stone. 

After watching me writhe in pain for over five hours, my husband couldn’t take it anymore and made the executive decision that I would be going to the Emergency Room, where a shot of morphine took care of my pain and a CT scan confirmed I had a 4.7mm stone about half way down the ureter. 

On that same Sunday I had awakened with a dream that my unofficial “mom” had died.  A phone call later that day confirmed it.  The funeral was pushed to two weekends later.

There was a lot of apprehension for me about the upcoming funeral.  Marilyn and I had met online, both of us writers, and we had developed a friendship.  As the time passed, she extended a genuine offer to adopt me.  We kind of laughed about it fondly, as the thought appealed to both of us for how our relationship had grown.  Then she said, “No I’m serious Michelle.  I want to adopt you.” 

I told her, “You don’t have to do that.  You’re like the mom I never had, and that is enough.  I simply love you.”  She did not let it go, and called me even one day and said she wanted to make it official and do it legally.  I was overwhelmed.  I put her off for a few months until she required an answer.  I explained to her that I didn’t want to interfere with her own family.  I had come into the picture quite late in the game (when she was 80 or so), and it was okay.  Besides, why ruin what we had?  [I have a history of family offers that ultimately failed, so this caused me anxiety to make it official.]

I knew that her children didn’t really know me.  She had spoken about me to them and they knew of me.  They are wonderful people, truly wonderful.  I entered Marilyn’s life at a time they had more distant relationships, and they lived in other parts of the country.  Marilyn and I probably bonded even more because she was longing for deeper connection with her children and I had no mother. 

So when she died and we were traveling to get to her funeral, I had some anxiety.  I knew what we had, but others did not.  Our relationship would most likely seem quaint or nostalgic to others, and not real.  But it was real to me.  It was real to Marilyn.  She had spoken to me many times about her death, had offered to give me her house (and I had deferred her back to her children), and some other things…

By the time of the funeral, none of the things Marilyn had spoken with me about had been conveyed to me by her children.  I was not in a love relationship with Marilyn for her things, so I refused to address them.  I thought one of the things was written in the will, but nothing was said to me.  When I arrived to the town of the funeral and fellowshipped with the friends around, some other things came to light of places of honor for others in the glaring emptiness for me.

The day of the funeral there were two “Reserved” rows at the funeral.  Two people sat in them.  And I sat with Bill apart from them in the general crowd.  It was a beautiful service and Marilyn was honored for the truly amazing person she is.  It was a privilege and honor to be there.

That night I awoke to Bill getting out of bed around two a.m.  When he didn’t come back to bed, I found him sitting in the dark.  I asked him if he was sick or if something was wrong.  He couldn’t sleep.  He said he was so bothered.  We got on the road and drove the twelve hours home.  And this is what he said to me…

He said he couldn’t sleep because he didn’t feel like I was honored the way Marilyn loved me and honored me.  He was hurt for me.  He knows my pain.  He knew I stood in the foyer of my own mother’s funeral where six hundred people attended and there was standing room only.  I was not seated with the family.  I was not acknowledged as a daughter.  He knows all the grandparents and aunts and uncles who have died and refused to acknowledge me as a daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, niece, etc.  He has seen my pain of being orphaned and abandoned and rejected that I have carried over and over and over, and he thought this time it would be different.  He knew how Marilyn loved me and I her.  He knew the commitments we had made to one another, and this was too much.

He couldn’t understand how her children did not honor me as such.  He wanted to say something to them, but I had forbidden it before.  But now, now that it was over, he wanted to say something.  We both acknowledged they probably simply didn’t know.  They didn’t understand what we had, and if they did, they saw it differently than I obviously did.

I listened.  I heard his pain for me in his voice.  I saw it in his eyes and in the strain on his face.  I said, “It’s okay, Bill.  God knows.”  He couldn’t understand why nothing was extended or offered to me.  To him it was wrong, and he of all people would understand the pain it would cause me.  I prayed.  Finally I said…

“I’m going to need you to kidney stone this.”  Bewildered he said, “What does that mean?”

“You’re hurt because I’m hurt.  You know me so well you know the damage this does to me, the old pains it resurrects, the rejection and abandonment it reiterates.  There’s still not a place for me of honor as a daughter.  And this grieves you for me.  But probably the children didn’t know or understand the conversations we’ve had, the commitments we had made to one another. (There’s no way they could know the rejection of my own mother(s).) If they didn’t know, telling them may cause them pain, feelings of guilt or shame and would change nothing and add burden.  I don’t want to do that.  That’s not helpful.  If they did know, well, I don’t want to know that.  It’s between them and God. 

“Just like you watched me writhe in debilitating pain with a kidney stone, you were helpless to help me.  There was really nothing you could do for me but support me, help me, hold me, carry me to help.  It’s the same here.  You see my pain.  Come along beside me and support me, help me work through the pain.  You can’t fix it and you can’t help it.  Voicing it to those you feel wronged me may make you feel better for a moment but you’ll feel worse after – because what’s been done can’t be changed and you will have dumped possible pain on others who probably did not mean to cause pain.  God has been faithful to heal me every time and this time will be no different.  Just help me carry the burden a little longer, love and support me while I heal.  This too will pass, just like the kidney stone.”

He agreed.

Later that day it hit me.  I think Bill hurt more for me this time than even I hurt for myself.  He was sleepless for the dishonor he thought was done to me.  He was in anguish for the pain he knew such rejection brings to me.  It was not okay to him, and he rose up like the protector he is to try to defend my honor.  Because I saw Bill’s pain at my pain, my own pain was somehow lessened.  He had shouldered that burden for me just by acknowledging and expressing it.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her…

Eph 5:14 NASU

What a demonstration of Christ’s love for us.  See, Christ’s love is perfect.  He sees all and knows all.  He knows the painful disappointments and hurts of our lives and how they have crippled us at times.  He hurts when we hurt.  His love understands all the nuances and variances that impact us, and why. 

But Christ also “kidney stones” it, not because He is powerless, but because He is perfect.  The order of life here on earth is fraught with misunderstandings and mistakes that create the ripple effect, impacting all that overlap with those involved.  Christ knows to respond to everything that hurts us by confrontation to the people the hurt came through may bring damage to the other people, people He loves as well, people who may have misunderstood or been negligent, or simply did not know.  He sees the whole picture.  He responds in love to all of us, all the time.  It just doesn’t always feel like love at the time.

While Bill is human and without the omniscience of God, he lays down his life for me in a myriad of ways almost daily.  But Christ is perfect.  What Bill beautifully attempts to do for me, Christ perfectly does for us. 

So Bill and my new phrase for when we need one another’s love and support but not an action of defense is “Gonna need you to kidney stone this”.  And we’ll have a visual reminder of the one we love in intense pain (physical, mental, emotional, whatever) that cannot be solved by our actions, so we must relent to stand alongside in prayer and love and create a place to heal for the other, relying on the perfect Love of Christ for the situation, so as to not create more damage.

This is a lesson a long time coming for me; one I wish I had known years and years ago.  It has made Christ’s words in Matthew 11:28-30 even more meaningful to me:

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.  Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

To be human on this earth is to endure pain and suffering, the only difference is degree and detail.  We are called to bear one another’s burdens to fulfill the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2).  We do this because He does this for us.

There are times wrongs are to be confronted and actions are to be taken, but we must be slow to react and quick to seek the heart of Christ in those situations. 

This particular experience was not that someone set out to wound me or carelessly injure, but it was a simple human misunderstanding and disappointments that the enemy capitalized on because of my past pain.  The enemy of my soul used some circumstances to try to cripple me back to the point of damage from rejection in a very vulnerable area for me.  This is why when I prayed when Bill wanted to engage in action to defend my honor, the Spirit led me to my recent experience (kidney stone) to help me understand. 

If we are serious about being conformed to the image of Christ, we must be serious about allowing the experiences of our lives to be used to help conform us.  If I react inappropriately, I miss the opportunity for me to be conformed into Christ’s image, and I bring potential damage to another child of God.  I have done this in my life more times than I can probably count.  I must be determined to learn what I need to learn. 

Ecclesiastes 3 tells us there are times for certain actions, just as there are times for the exact opposite actions.  I must seek God for understanding the appropriate action for my particular situation.  I have failed this so many times.  I pray I begin to succeed in this more in the days and years ahead.

But the beautiful lesson in this for me is that Christ loves us perfectly.  There are times He Himself has risen to my defense, and there are other times He appears immobile and silent.  He sees what we do not see. But He has always loved me through the pain and brought me the healing I need, and He is able to do this without damaging another.

Overcoming Trauma

I went to dinner recently with one of my best friends.  He got a call when we were at dinner and the call went long.  So I got up and walked around, made a few phone calls myself and returned.  He was still on the phone.  Eventually he moved out to the parking lot when I was walking around.  I just kept circling the parking lot, walking past shops and stores, waiting for the perpetual call to end.  Since we were in a strange city and I was at the mercy of his transportation, I did not seem to have anywhere to go on my own accord.  I was pretty agitated because I thought it was discourteous.  I said my piece and left it at that.

A few days later I was meeting him at a location in another strange city where I knew no one.  I was still in the parking lot when he went into the building.  I had to deal with some issues in my car, and when I went into the (strange and unfamiliar) building, he wasn’t there.  I cannot explain the rage I felt in that moment.  I had no idea where he was and he didn’t answer his phone when I called him.

Minutes later when he resurfaced, I was furious.  I heard myself yell at him in the elevator, “Stop leaving me alone in parking lots!”  I could tell my rage was disproportionate to the event, but couldn’t figure out why.  I asked God why I was so mad.  An image flashed in my mind’s eye of my sister and me sitting in a pickup in the middle of a pasture.

It was a flashback to when I think I was maybe five or six, and she was six or seven.  My parents were farmers and we had gone to this pasture to do something for farm work.  My mom had told us to sit in the truck and wait for her to return.   It was fine at first, as we busied ourselves with playing.  As time progressed we bickered and picked at each other.  Then as more time progressed we panicked.  We were both sure she wasn’t coming back, and we both began sobbing hysterically.  Shortly after our hysteria hit, our mom showed up and was confused and annoyed with our emotional outburst.

As young as we were, we didn’t realize what prompted it.  We had been adopted at ages four and five, and we had been left by our biological mom at ages two and three.  We didn’t have that memory consciously, but clearly we had it subconsciously and it caused us great angst a few years later when what felt like a similar scenario arose.

So as recent as in this last year, being left in a strange city where I knew no one triggered some of that same anxiety.  How odd that forty years later I could still be triggered, albeit to a lesser degree.  When I saw the flashback to my sister and I in the pickup crying hysterically, afraid we had been abandoned by our second mom, I was able to understand my current anger and frustration and move on without it causing more trouble. 

What if I had not had the insight from God on why I was so upset?  I’m sure I would’ve railed on my best friend, caused a rift in our friendship and who knows what other fallout may have occurred.    

Trauma rewires the brain

The human mind is complex.  Trauma rewires your brain.  The younger you are at the time of trauma, the more difficult it is to discern quickly when it is causing a reaction.  If you don’t have the conscious memory of the traumatic event, and you don’t have an awareness, it’s improbable you will ascertain its impact years later in varying situations. 

I’ve spent most of my life healing from various traumas and learning how to walk in health.  Because of how childhood trauma wired me, I’m particularly careful who I let into my inner circle.  I can count those I’ve let in on one hand.  More on that later…

Another more recent event expounds on this.   I had traveled with a best friend to a strange city.  While there an emergency arose for “Mary”.  Mary had to fly out of the city to the emergency, leaving me alone in the strange city for a day.  She would return late the next night.  She asked if I’d be okay at the hotel without a car for a day and a half.  I assured her I would.  I’m a researcher and writer, so being alone is not a problem.  I had her take me to grab some lunch before she left, knowing I’d be limited on meal options over the next 32 hours or so.  She returned a bit later than we expected and I was famished.  Because it was almost eleven, not many places were open and I opted to just go to bed after driving to try to find food.

Mary left the next day for some meetings that took way longer than expected.  This was day three.  As the day progressed and night fell, I could tell my psyche was struggling but I didn’t know why.  I was hungry.  It was the end of the third day and I still hadn’t had a meal since the original lunch.  I finally opted to go to bed, praying the whole time trying to figure out why I was so bothered.

Mary offered to take me to get food when she returned from her meetings, but again, it was too late for any real food places to be open.  I wasn’t mad at Mary, but I was struggling and didn’t understand why.  I was tearful and wanted to cry the rest of the night.  I prayed a lot, asking God why I was so troubled, but finally opted to go to bed in hopes of waking to a new day. 

When I awoke on day four, I was indifferent.  I determined I would do what I had to do to get a meal and not rely upon Mary (she had the only mode of transportation).  I sought the Lord that morning about why I was so bothered.  I wondered if it was from some of the heavy stuff I was researching and maybe it had settled in more deeply than I realized.  Then I saw an image flash across my mind’s eye.  It was a kitchen stool sitting along a wall.

Then I saw my childhood home and the kitchen dining room area.  The kitchen stool sat along the kitchen wall, and the long table stretched in the adjoining dining area.  One of my punishments in my childhood was sitting on that stool.  For hours.  Often it would be as the family sat and had a meal and I did without.

Now I’m going to get into some details that will take some time, but it’s necessary to help understand the complexities of the human mind and the rewiring trauma does. 

When I was doing deliverance work for myself, I worked with a couple people who specialized in deliverance and intercession.   Because I was adopted, there’s not a lot I know about my birth mother other than what I’ve been able to piece together over time from some interviews and some court records.

During one of my deliverance sessions, one of my intercessors saw me as a little girl, maybe one or two, and I was beside a large tree looking up at the apple hanging down, trying to stretch out my hand to get one but couldn’t reach.  There was a ladder, but the first rung was too high for me to reach.  And she got the scripture, Psalm 145:15:  “The eyes of all look to You, and You give them their food in due time.”

As we prayed the intercessors got that my nutritional needs during early childhood were amiss.  My biological mom had alcohol, drug and sex addictions.  She smoked when she was pregnant with me.  She was in poverty and food was hit and miss in the home (from the state child welfare records).  When we got adopted a few years later, my new mom’s methods of discipline included withholding food.

So there was an early childhood trauma of malnourishment, and it was compounded by a later action of withholding food, punishment from food.  The first trauma rewired the brain, and the second reinforced it.  It’s taken me a lot of years to manage some eating dysfunctions I have (mostly binging, sometimes hoarding food). 

How are these traumas healed?  How are they overcome?

Trauma rewires the brain.  The solution and healing to the trauma is found in God.  The eyes of all look to You and You give them their food in due time.  This is the truth.  God provides even when man fails.

The events of the four days without a meal thing (I had snacks, it’s not like I was starving) created phantom pains for me, reminiscent of earlier traumas.  I’m healed.  I don’t struggle with eating disorders and unhealthy thought patterns about food anymore.  And yet, forty years later, a situation had just enough similarity to trigger a phantom pain or fear. 

Had it not been for the insight I received when I petitioned the Lord for why I was struggling (the flashback of the kitchen stool), I would not have had the awareness that this was just trauma trying to reinsert itself in my thinking and create additional drama in my life.  As soon as I saw the kitchen stool I had an immediate awareness that this was a false affliction. 

What I’m trying to do is two-fold:  address trauma triggers and address solutions. 

Because of how trauma rewires the brain, in future situations that rewiring causes dramatic reactions that otherwise would not be there.  Something gets rewired to assess situations through a trauma filter, and in the future, similar situations can trigger the trauma responses.

The solution is Christ, of course.  But that’s such a pat answer to such a complex condition.  Let’s look at it like this….

Give yourself some grace when you feel triggered.  Try not to react in dramatic measure.  When you feel yourself reacting disproportionately to the circumstances pull back and breathe in deeply.  Recognize something is amiss and give yourself time to work through it.  Don’t berate yourself if your immediate reaction is inappropriate.  It probably will be, because trauma causes that.  Just try to catch it quicker the next time.  You’ll find as time goes by the triggers will come fewer and further between.  Again, give yourself grace.

Give others in the situation grace, understanding they don’t perceive the current situation through a trauma filter.   My friends couldn’t possibly know I was having an uncontrolled reaction based on a trauma stimulus.  Heck, it took me awhile to figure it out.  Give them grace, and don’t feel like you need to explain yourself.  Trauma and trauma responses are vulnerability issues.  I hate being vulnerable to anyone, and I try to keep these things completely between me and God.  Sometimes, however, if it’s someone I love and trust deeply, I will bring them into my trauma circle for a moment.

About ten years ago I was doing dishes and looked out the window and saw the traffic police pull up to radar for a school zone.  I was immediately enraged, like I went from do-ta-do to ARGHH in a split second.  The contempt I had for those cops was off the charts.  After a few minutes I asked God, “Why do I feel like this?  They’re just doing their job!”  He responded, “Because police took you away from your mom when you were two.  You’ve hated police ever since.”

Know this:  I do not have a conscious memory of police taking me away.  I was too young to remember or I repressed it.  But the trauma trigger for me still existed.  I asked God what to do.  He told me to forgive the policeman who took me away, and to forgive police in general.  I did.  That anger left that day and has not returned.  Sometimes I have phantom twinges trying to pull me back into that anger, but I recall the truth (I have forgiven them and they are just doing their job) and I choose to walk in that truth instead.

This leads me back to the Christ answer.  Christ has the answer for each of your traumas.  He knows what was rewired.  He knows what triggers you and why.  Learn to ask Him.  He can and will heal it.  I can already hear some of you, “But I don’t hear God like you do.”  I know.  I know.  It’s not that you don’t hear Him; it’s that you haven’t recognized the way He speaks to you.

Sometimes He answers with a thought in my head, sometimes with a memory recall, sometimes with an image (like the kitchen stool, or the pickup in the empty pasture), and sometimes it takes a few days.  But if you seek Him, you will find Him.  Learn to hear.  Learn to respond.  The more you respond, the easier it becomes to hear.  You’ll eventually stop doubting and start trusting. 

Trauma can be healed.  Trauma can be overcome.  For me, God has been the surest way to do so.

I hear God in a variety of ways, so I’m going to touch on a few of them, and what I’ve learned about God along the way.

I’ve learned God is a personal God.  While He has corporate messages for the children of God that come through various mouthpieces He uses, He is also very interested in personal relationships with His children individually.  In fact, He speaks more regularly and directly to His individual children than He gives through corporate messages.  I honestly think everyone has heard the voice of God, but maybe just haven’t recognized it. 

Mostly, His is the still small voice in your head that sounds like your own, but maybe not how you’d say it.  The best illustration I’ve heard of this is the baby in the womb who hears his mother’s voice from the moment his hearing is developed.  For several months he hears this voice and it is familiar to him.  Then when he is born, at some point the baby will turn his head toward the same voice.

People who haven’t recognized the voice of God yet are like the baby in the womb, hearing it, but not identifying it yet.  There is a time we leave the womb (figuratively) and we begin to turn our head to that same voice out of the womb, and we begin to identify it.  We start to get a face and an identity to go with that voice, and we grow in our relationship with that voice.

Trial and Error

Most of the experiences I’ve had with the still small voice have been a process of trial and error.  A thought will come to me that isn’t quite what I was thinking, isn’t quite the way I would think it, and I’ll ask if that was God.  Then I’ll begin a process of discernment.  Does it contradict or align with Scripture?  Does it contradict or align with the character of God?  (That’s a bit trickier because we have some false concepts of God.  More on that in a minute.) 

For me, sometimes the voice comes out of the blue when I’m not even praying or conversing with God, when I’m not necessarily thinking about the thing that is said by God.  These are almost always the voice of God.  [For example, one day I was driving eastward on 21^st St. and His voice, that sounded a lot like my own thoughts, said, “Do you know what your problem is, Michelle?”  Well that was undeniably God.  If I had asked the question, I would’ve known the answer.  It came separate from my own thoughts, and caught me by surprise.  – and THAT is a fantastic story of something I learned both about myself and the character of God, but will make this article too long.)

He also speaks to me in prayer or when I’m hammering something out with Him.  Discernment is what enables me to recognize and understand when it’s His voice.  This is the trickier part when it comes during prayer or a conversation.  (We also must learn to cover our prayers with the Blood of Christ, because dark spirits like to interject into our thoughts and pretend to be God or just deceive.)  Through time and trial and error, we’re able to discern His voice in prayer and dialogue with Him.  Just practice and keep practicing.  When you think it may be Him, proceed as though it is and see where it goes.  Sometimes we recognize it later when we think back on something and then realize, oh no, that was the voice of God and I thought it was my own thoughts.  Over time it gets easier and easier.  We will miss it sometimes, but as we practice hearing, we’ll miss it less and less.

God frequently speaks to us via our thoughts.  They sound like our own thoughts, but discernment teaches us how to sift ours from God’s, and the enemy’s (because he inserts himself into our thoughts as well).  The process of trial and error is what sharpens us to more easily and quickly discerning when God is speaking to us.

[False concepts of God – Sidebar]

I only address this because it needs to be said.  We carry a whole lot of false concepts of who God is in our being.  Initially we struggle with transference.  We transfer our dad or mom or our parents’ character onto who or what we think God is.  That’s probably the first false concept we have to shatter.

The longer we’ve been in the institutional church, the more false concepts we’ll have of God.  There’s just too much false teaching, too many feel good doctrines as well as wrath of God doctrines, and we’ll gravitate to what’s most familiar to us.  Then without a lot of introspection, we’ll apply those doctrines to our perspective of God.

We basically have to strip our expectations bare and allow God to reveal who He is to us, without all the filters we insist we don’t have.  Otherwise, we’ll wrongly attribute the voice of the enemy as God’s, because the enemy has been studying you since birth and knows how you think, and you’ll recognize the familiarity and accept it.  Or we’ll discard or reject a word from God because it doesn’t sound like it could possibly be God (our version of who we think God is). 

Dreams

God spoke to me in dreams a lot when I was going through deliverance from past traumas and abuse.  It was a long season, and I didn’t know who or what to trust.  God, who knitted me together in my mother’s womb, knew I was scared and untrusting.  So He chose to depict scenes and scenarios in my dream life to speak to me separate from my mind.  I’m intellectually driven, and God had to bypass my intellect to reach me in the regions of the soul and spirit.  My intellect would have overridden His leading by the deception it was in, and I was unaware of this at the time.  So it was dreams.  And I had to learn the language of God through dreams.  It circumvented my intellect very well, and He was able to begin a long, thorough process of walking me through healing and deliverance.

Now He does not speak to me in dreams as much.  I’ve learned how to let my spirit follow His Spirit, and my intellect is kept in check (most of the time) to keep me from sabotaging His efforts.  But He will break through to me in dreams when He has a special message or something He wants to show me that doesn’t follow our normal avenues of connection.  I’ve learned how to hear and see Him through His dream messages, and they’re still some of my favorite exchanges with Him.  I love them because I can’t contrive them.  I’ve learned some valuable lessons about dream life, the subconscious, garrisoning the imagination, etc.  Maybe I’ll write more on that later. 

Just like everything else, your dream life needs covered in the Blood of Christ.  The enemy can invade your dream life as well.

Nature

This may be one of my favorite ways God communicates with me.  He expresses Himself to me through nature.  From observation of nature, He speaks to me about His character.  He shows me things about human nature and Himself.  His presence is more vivid to me in these times. 

Other People

This is one of the fewest ways God speaks to me.   I’ve been burned too many times by charlatans and forked tongues.  He knows I don’t trust people or their motives (for the most part), so I don’t receive messages very well through other people.  When I do get messages from God via other people, it is usually quite plain.  It’s a phrase He has previously dropped in my spirit.  It’s a topic that He keeps revisiting me with.  It’s an undeniable addressing of something only He would know. 

But He does speak to me through my husband.  I am able to hear Him through my husband, and occasionally another person I dearly love and trust. 

His Word

He speaks to me through His Word.  Sometimes when reading it, He elucidates a point.  Many times I feel His presence and get a “knowing”.  I just know and understand something that bypassed my intellect and normal modes of reasoning.  He simply “downloads” understanding to me.

He then uses His Word throughout my day.  He’ll speak to me in circumstances and show me how to apply His Word.  A Scripture or story from the Bible will come to my thoughts and I’ll see how it applies.  He will impress a particular Scripture on me sometimes when I’m praying for someone, and it will give me better direction on how to pray.

Numbers

He speaks to me in numbers.  This probably came about for me because of all the dreams in the earlier years.  There would be a number of something (four empty bar stools in the four corners of a room, four rotten eggs, four broken teeth and four exploded cars in four different dreams – many years ago.  Other things like a dollar amount will be stated or written, a clock will be exposed, etc.) in my dreams and I’d have to seek the meaning of the number to understand the interpretation of the dream.

I downloaded and printed out E.W. Bullinger’s “Number in Scripture”, and have a number of dream books with number meanings.  These were my go to for years.

Sometimes God will wake me up in the night, and the time will be a Scripture reference that speaks to me about something God wants me to understand.  For example, one night I woke up at 3:51.  I got up, went downstairs, got something to drink.  Came back upstairs and went to the bathroom, fiddling around.  When I went back to bed, the clock still said 3:51.  This was an “impossibility”.  I asked God what I was supposed to understand.  As I searched for understanding, I discovered there were three books in the Bible with a 51^st chapter (Psalm, Isaiah, Jeremiah).  They each dealt with various deliverance issues (personal, corporate and national). 

But yeah, God still speaks to me in numbers in my dreams, the clock, my daily encounters, etc.

And He’s speaking to you

It may be any number of these examples that He talks to you, or a whole different combination.  I know a gal who gets messages from God from license plates.  I’ve tried that.  (correlate the license plate number to a Strong’s number and apply it to the prayer need)  It doesn’t work for me, but it plainly and obviously did for her.  I don’t discount that because it doesn’t really apply to me but does to her.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that God is personal.  He knows us intimately and He speaks to us personally.  The way I talk to my best friend is different than the way I speak with the checker at the store is different than I speak to my daughter.  And the way I speak to one of my daughters is not necessarily the way I speak to another of my daughters.  I respond to people individually with tailored language that’s based on a myriad of things… our relationship, their personality (and mine), the topic of discussion, our history together, my mood or his/hers, etc. 

The way God talks to me may make another person cry!  (“Do you know what your problem is, Michelle?”)  But He knows me.  He speaks my language.  He knows when He has to circumvent my intellect and when to engage with it.  And as He has painstakingly made His ways known to me as I have sought Him, just as He does and will do for each of His children He calls by name. 

On a separate post I will write up one of my favorite encounters with Him on this.