Leighton Ford - A Life of Listening: Discerning Gods Voice and Discovering Our Own

Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

N ot long ago I took our daughter Debbie and two of our grown grandchildren on a memory trip to places in Canada where I grew up.

One special spot we visited was on Lake Rosseau in the Muskoka lakes region. It was once the site of a Bible conference, long since defunct, where my mother took me many summers of my early life.

As we cruised by boat along the rocky shore, I could see the old buildings derelict and deserted, but the memories stayed with me. I recalled the childrens meetings where a retired missionary woman and a college student told us about Jesus, and how at the end of that week I put up my hand to say I wanted to know and follow him.

The leaders said I was too young. But after I lifted my hand three times they realized I knew what I wanted, at least as much as a child could take in.

I was five then. Now, eighty plus years later, I can barely recall the voices and faces of that missionary lady and that college student, but I know that through them I heard another Voice calling me, a voice I have been listening for ever since. So I write my listening story not because it is a perfect story or one to emulate but as a testament to the power of listening for the voice of my Lord.

Did I always listen to what the poet Mary Oliver called his incomparably lovely young-man voice? No, not always. Often I have been too busy, too preoccupied with my own thoughts, too intent on having my own way or waywardness. Yet often, when I have truly listened, that other Voice has spoken quietly but insistently.

Did I sometimes mistake my own voice for that Other? No doubt, but when I have stopped to pay attention I have recognized, through and beyond my own and other voices, the Voice of One who speaks with accents of truth, love, beauty, and grace.

I truly believefrom the Holy Scriptures and my own experiencethat out of the many voices that speak to us, voices of blessing or otherwise, as we discern the Voice of the Great Shepherd, we find our own deepest identity.

As that splendid poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, each mortal thing cries, What I do is me, for that I came. Then in a magnificent image he writes that Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his, to the Father, through the features of mens faces.

Hopkinss words resonate with the biblical promise that we can be changed, transformed. They are also in sync with neuroscientists who study the brain, who are telling us that our brains are not totally hardwired, that they can be rewired.

So I truly believe, as we listen deeply and faithfully to Christ the Living Word, as his words in Scripture and his Spirit indwell our brains and imaginations, we may discern his voice through ten thousand voices, and heeding, become the persons we were created to be and long to be.

I hope you may find my story interesting and encouraging. But more than that, I pray it will be to you an invitation not just to listen on occasion but to be a listener, one who pays attention to the God who speaks.

N o matter how hard I try, I cannot remember the sound of my mothers voice.

I can summon to mind her appearanceshort and stern, fashionably dressed. But when I try to recall the tone, the scale, the rhythm of her speech, some inflectionnothing comes. Others tell me she sounded like an old-time schoolmarm, her voice high-pitched and thin like a birds.

Maybe its because she was my adoptive mother, not my birth mother. But I did not know that for the first dozen years of my life.

Or maybe its because while I was growing up, my mother would spend hours lecturing meher preferred method of correction. So I may have blocked it out. It was as if hers was a voice that I heard, and heard, and heard, and then had to stop hearing.

There is another Voice who has been calling to me all my life, like somebody I already know, somebody I know I will recognize on meeting for the first time. It is the invisible thread twining through my life, drawing all other threads together. When I finally meet this Voice, I will be face-to-face with Jesus. He will speak my true name. I will answer and for the first time hear the sound of my own true voice. I will know that, finally, I have come all the way home.

This invisible thread began its weaving through my life long before I was aware of it. My mothers was the first voice that spoke to me, earliest and most insistently. In those years the Voice sounded very like my mother. It took me a long time to tell the difference.