Hearing from God
I was 7 or maybe 8 years old and visiting the gfolks on Washington Drive. Even though I visited the gfolks I spent a lot of time alone playing with my nanny. My nanny was a black Labrador named Boy, and we would spend hours in the backyard during the summer simply playing. We would play in the sprinklers, dig holes in my grandmother’s garden (She would yell at me through the window to not mess up her plants, but it was too late, the excavations had already begun), use the clothes line as impromptu jungle gym, and sing songs with a fake guitar under the tree in the backyard.
There was a specific evening in the summer of ’84 that I sat under the old tree in our backyard that often dripped of sticky sap. No one liked sitting under the tree because of the sticky sap and often bee hive nests would rest in the tree, but I loved it. It was my lil spot, on what seemed then, to be a never ending backyard.
Under the tree, I started to sing my heart out. I made up a song and pretended to play an instrument. My only audience was Boy. He went from sitting next to lying out as a sphinx across the grass as I would sing. I spent hours under the tree when I noticed the sun beginning to set and Mama calling me in to set the table for dinner.
But all of a sudden, the atmosphere changed. The evening air turned into a soft breeze, and it even woke up Boy. I could hear a voice. It wasn’t a person or a sound that someone else could hear, but it was clear, strong, and specific. The few words I heard were a poetic phrase that has stuck with me my whole life. The voice of my Creator!
“I created you. You are mine, and I love you.”
I began to cry. I lifted my hands in the air and prayed to Him. I told him everything, no secrets anymore. Have been telling him everything ever since. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I came in and told Mama that God was speaking to me outside. She simply said, “of course He is darling! He talks to all of us all the time!”
Later on that month my catechism teacher taught us that we have to be careful with everything we say and do, because Jesus is a big spy. He’ll watch everything that we do, and we will be in BIG trouble with Him. Someone in the class asked how He could watch everything. The catechism teacher said that He comes down to earth and transforms himself into a tree, wall, butterfly, or a dolphin to watch us. It was the strangest statement I ever heard a Roman Catholic nun say.
I recall standing up and telling the nun that it isn’t true. That Jesus visited me under a tree and talked to me, and he didn’t need a tree to tell me anything. He’s God. He doesn’t need anything at all. The nun shushed me and told me to sit down, said that it wasn’t true. That God doesn’t speak to anyone anymore.
I keep that nun in my prayers to this very day.
I thank God for speaking to me that day and for speaking to me every day since. What would be the point if we couldn’t hear Him? How could we call ourselves followers if we can’t hear the directions in which the Leader would like us to go?
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