Can You Hear God's Voice?

     I am sitting in my hotel room in Montana at 4:30 a.m., in front of my computer screen trying to let God speak to me about what I am suppose to write about today. I have been sitting here staring at a blank screen for over an hour. I bet you are wondering why I am not asleep at 3:30 in the morning. I have to admit I am very tired. We have had several late nights and early mornings in a row and both Dwayne and I are extremely tired. However, though we are both tired; our bodies handle it differently. When Dwayne is very tired and he sleeps, he snores. The more tired he is; the more he snores and the louder he snores. He is really, really tired tonight! I try hard to ignore it but sleeping when he is really tired is one thing I have never been able to do. At home, I would just go to another room to sleep but in a hotel room there is nowhere to go. So, I decided to get up and write my devotion. Except, I have learned another thing. I can’t concentrate when I am really tired except at the snoring that is happening from the bed. After sitting here for a while I have realized that maybe if I put my earplugs in and listened to a book on my phone, I could drown him out and go to sleep. It worked on the plane! I got my phone out and my earphones. I put my earphones in and went to turn on my phone and wouldn’t you know; it is dead. So I have dug out my charging plug and I am now waiting for my phone to charge. As I continue to sit here thinking about all the great ideas I have for today’s devotion and yet each one can’t get past the initial thought. I have conceded to write about my husband’s snoring. I tried not to write about it, though it was my first thought, because remember, he edits my devotion and I didn’t think he would like my subject choice. But after an hour of sitting here, I decided that God must want me to write about his snoring. So he will just have to deal with God over today’s devotion illustration! lol
     In our daily lives we can get tired from the stresses we deal with everyday. We all respond differently to this stress. Many times, the more tired we become, the more we concentrate on the problems. Sometimes we run from the problems by concentrating on something else. If the stress is at home, we concentrate on work. If the stress it at work, we concentrate on home. However, there are those times we can’t seem to be able to get away from our problems or stresses and we become extremely tired. We know we need to spend time with God and let Him speak to us, but between the tiredness and the focus on the problems we just can’t hear Him. What do we do then? We ask Him to speak louder to us than the screams of life and when our power to hear Him is running on dead batteries, we plug into His power source, the Holy Spirit. We open the Bible and start reading until He speaks to us, or we pray without ceasing until we hear from Him, or we go to a spiritual leader in our life and seek wisdom and advice, or we take our circumstance and we see what God is trying to tell us through circumstance. Sometimes the circumstances are speaking to us loudly because God is trying to teach us something through them.
     One thing is for sure, ‘life happens’ and when it does, it can catch us off guard when we are extremely tired. How are you going to respond? Are you going to fight it and not find rest? Or are you going to find a way to hear God beyond the loudness of your problem? The rest we seek comes only from hearing His voice!

My sheep recognize my voice. I know them, and they know me.

John 10:27