Liezel joined me at church and youth group and sat in on many of the SCA (Student Christian Association) meetings in high school – she loved being around Christians but she wasn’t ready to surrender her life to God.
As we walked out of church one night she reflected on the message about the end times and the rapture of all the believers into heaven and laughingly said she’d be partying until she heard the sound of trumpets, announcing the return of Jesus Christ, before she gave her life to Him.
That’s quite a statement to live under – partying hard, while listening out for the trumpet call of heaven, but I think a lot of people live like that. Nobody wants to seriously contemplate the possibility of spending an eternity in hell and so, we hedge our bets and go to church, at least a few times a year, give our money to the poor and unused clothing and food to charity and try and be good – all in the hope that if God is real, we may just get into heaven by the skin of our teeth.
Some years ago, I got chatting to a guy who believes that God exists, but He doesn’t communicate with or gets involved in the affairs of mankind. If God stays at arm’s length from man, we are left to our own devices and so enjoy the benefits of good choices and suffer the consequences of bad choices without direction from our Creator.
I, on the other hand, grew up learning about a God who wants to communicate with us, who wants us to know Him and His heart for us and who made a way – through the death and resurrection of His own Son – for us to hear Him.
God spoke to our eight-year-old son the other day. I was late to collect him after soccer practice, so he walked to the school library to see if I was there, but it was closed. Next, he went to aftercare, but I wasn’t there either. As he started heading back towards the soccer field, he stopped and asked God to tell him where he could find his mommy. When he heard nothing, he asked God to give him a sign to show him which way he should go. As he finished praying, he looked up to see the leaves on the ground pointing in a specific direction, so he walked that way and who should be coming up the stairs at the very moment he was coming down them – yip, it was me, his mommy. What a happy reunion that was!
Regardless of who you are, how old you are, where you’ve been or what you’ve done, know this – God is real and He is speaking to you all the time. We just have to tune in to the frequency of His voice. Perhaps if, like my son, we’re looking for how God is communicating to us, we’ll hear and see more of Him.