There have been times in my life when I have grieved, when I have felt such overwhelming sadness that I have hurt, physically hurt, deep within my heart. A friend dies, a parent is hospitalized, a tumor is found—three unrelated moments in my life that have threatened to tear me apart from the inside out.
Everyone suffers. My story is not unique. But it is when we suffer that God’s voice is most clear.
In his book Where God Was Born, Bruce Feiler writes about listening for God, “We should listen … for what the prophet Elijah experiences as the ‘still, small voice’ of God, the soft murmuring sound in our most wounded places that yearns for goodness and aches for forgiveness.”
When I wrote about that “still, small voice” before, on June 20th, I wrote about where to find that voice, how to listen for that voice, about finding God in silence.
But once we find God, once we’re aware that He is speaking, what does that voice say? What is God trying to tell us?
It is perhaps easiest to hear God when we are at our most wounded because during those times we really make the effort to search for Him. It is those times that we are most aware of the difference between the life we’re living and the life God wants for us.
“We were meant to live for so much more,” the band Switchfoot sings in their song, Meant to Live.
Those words give me chills every time I hear them. They are the words I imagine God saying to me all my life, through every bit of trouble that hijacked my spirit and sent my world spinning. I see God then. I see Him bending over me as I sleep and I hear Him whispering, “You were meant for so much more than this.”
You were meant for so much more. What does that mean?
It means that even when we suffer, God has plans for us. And even though there are times in our lives when we want nothing more than to curl up in a dark corner like a sick pet and wait for life to pass us by, God expects more.
He expects more from us because He knows … He knows that suffering often begets miracles.
In Genesis 50:20, Joseph confronts his family who sold him into slavery. He tells them, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”
God is in the business of working miracles and sometimes the greatest miracles arise from the greatest suffering.
I know something about miracles. I’ve seen them work in others. I’ve seen miracles move and shape my own life. If I look at who I was and what I lived through as a child, to what I am today—my life is a blessing of such a scale it could only be called miraculous.
You see I listened to that still, small voice as a child.
And I have always believed in miracles.
