When God speaks to you

Do not allow the doubt of others to cast you out of faith.

God spoke to me and changed my heart so that I could not have another abortion.

Did that lead me to be any less pro-choice? Hell no. Did God tell me that abortion is murder? Nope. But my heart was transformed so that MY will was no longer aligned with the option.

I discussed this with my partner, and we went about business as usual. Pulling out, which had been successful for years. But I told him... two years won’t guarantee two more.

Three months later... I was pregnant.

And I sat in fear from Thursday through Sunday when I told him, and some days later he accused me of suddenly changing my mind. He said I picked a hell of a time to have a crisis of conscience. But that’s not what it was.

I told him my mind wasn’t changed, my heart was changed... and I had come to him directly. He can’t say he didn’t know.

I tried to explain that God spoke to me... hoping the man who spoke of spending his life with me would understand. But he laughed. He called me crazy. He yelled at me. I breathed. I asked if he really didn’t understand the concept... he said he understood the concept, but that I am crazy. He said he doesn’t question that God speaks to people, but he questions it because it’s coming from me. “Because you are CRAZY.”

I was stunned, but unmoved. I have PTSD, and I have struggled and he has been gentle... he has never called me crazy, but quite the opposite, reminding me that I was having a normal reaction to an abnormal situation... how disappointing of him, to play this role now of all times. And on top of it, to call me crazy because I knew it would be a sin to end this child’s life, not as a rule about abortion but per the situation, as I was told quite explicitly not to! As I was called quite sincerely to carry this child.

I tried to explain to him that I never felt the need for an intermediary when God is my creator and made me whole, built me to be refined by the challenges of this world, yet would always hold me close. I tried to explain that I do not base sin on what man has written on a page, but on what God has written on my heart. And he continued to laugh.

He later asked me if I had questioned who was talking to me. I told him it was less like being spoken to and more like being spoken into, in a language beyond speech. He said whatever, did I ever question who that message came from.

I told him no. He told me that then, he would need me to do that. I thought he had a lot of nerve, to speak like that, but little faith. It circled back to a theme he holds dear: don’t talk to your ancestors because you don’t know who’ll answer. A heartbreaking cry from a blindfolded child certain he’s wandered out of the proverbial garden. A boy who doesn’t understand that his ancestors’ are the shoulders on which he stands.

I sighed. I placated him. I shook my head. But did I question God?

No!

I have never been confused about who God is. Why should I, when I am of God? It was incomprehensible that I should question my creator, asking “are you my creator?” when I have never walked this earth in living memory not knowing God. I wondered though how his words might have hurt a woman who didn’t know better, or who didn’t know she knows better. I wondered at the power of his words to shake a person’s faith. I wondered a lot... but I did not wonder at God’s hands on me. At God’s imperative in that moment, translated into words as best I can: “when I put a light in you, do not extinguish it.” It was a command. I knew that to end this pregnancy would be to go against God and he continued to respond with derision. So I continued to be my faith.

He later sent a text that said, “must be God because the devil tried to rip me from my child before I even had a chance to find out,” referring to the fact that a mentally ill relative began raving hours before he found out, threatened his life and his freedom and descended their home into chaos just hours before he found out about the pregnancy. I didn’t reply to that directly, because it had always been God and should he come to his own understanding in his own way, who was I to make comment in either direction?

When God speaks to you or through you... let it flow. Do not let the words of others when they ask, “who do you think you are, that God would speak to you?” be anything but the noise of a wave against the rock of you.

But honor the wave itself for contributing to your shape and place in the great landscape... honor the forces of God which brought each wave to you... which formed you as the mountain even as it transformed you into the sand, into 7 billion pieces each the size of a mustard seed.

God knows you... and you know God.

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I’m not speaking to everyone because I know that some will not connect with this, and some do not believe in any concept of God... I am not here to address the general “you,” but you, who needed to hear this. And you, who understands this and you, who wish to.