I write this piece in hopes that it may help someone who, like me, has been messed up by many years of twisted religion. Sadly, my theology has been greatly impacted by the movie Monte Python and the Search for the Holy Grail. I imagined God as an angry old white dude in the sky. His salty condemnations from on high made up the majority of our communications. He handed down prohibitions and nearly no one on this planet could appease his ridiculous demands.

That god’s vision for my life was that I become staler and more flavorless than an old communion cracker. He demanded I circle the drain towards an eventual transformation into Ned Flanders. Naturally I ran from this God. I was much too smart (as are most people) to force myself to become something so incongruent with my authentic self.

But was that God’s voice I was hearing or just empty religion? Would I even know God’s voice if I heard it?

Throughout human history those of us who say we believe in God don’t normally recognize his voice. According to my very limited understanding, God is all around us and communicating to us through a variety of different mediums. If we will stop and pay attention, it’s very possible you’ll perceive God speaking to you this moment.

God is at work both outside and within you. The poet Lord Byron recognized that his non-stop creative impulse was none other than the Holy Spirit itself. His worship was to act in agreement with that impulse: to create beautiful art. Some of you have that same gnawing desire to be creative and don’t realize that every time you make a new beat or sew a new quilt you are singing your version of praises to the heavens.

But how can you perceive what voice you’re really hearing?

If you’ve slowed down and taken the time to listen, if you’ve been steeped in silence and think you’re hearing the voice from a place of consolation and not desolation, if what you’re hearing is confirmed by those who truly love and care for you, and is also confirmed by your own feeling of joy when you listen to that voice – well nothing is 100% for sure, but it’s extremely likely that you’re hearing the voice of God.

If by chance you happen to follow that voice, this is called ‘faith’. The word ‘faith’ is synonymous with the word ‘risk’ – that is, you walk towards something that has not yet come to be, in expectation that it one day will. If someone tells you they are a person of faith, but they take no risks in their life, they are not a person of faith.

So, if you walk in faith, then you walk in risk. The risks you take can have a myriad of forms, like a creative/artistic risk or a physical risk. Or perhaps it’s an emotional risk like having a courageous conversation with a family member or telling a close friend you’re romantically in love with them. Maybe it’s a financial or a professional risk, like leaving the certainty of a steady paycheck to follow a long-held life dream.

Taking risk, you are strolling the path of uncertainty to unfamiliar and often frightening places. It is exciting because something new may happen, but at times also lonely because persons of faith are few and far between.

I write this now to encourage you along. Don’t play it safe and don’t worry about being normal. Just do what it is you know you’ve got to do.

The voice of God is inside of each and every one of you, and is speaking to you at every moment of everyday. From a deep, deep place it is calling you towards something that you’ve inherently known for a long time. The word “call” comes from the Latin “vocare” which is the root for “vocal” and “vocation”. Your vocation is your calling. It is the dream deep inside you, the risk you’ve been putting off all these years.

I’ve answered the call a handful of times in my life, once was in deciding to move to China. I hardly recognized the voice but told a friend at the time “it feels like an invisible hand is guiding me towards China”.

Even then, I could hear a calling, despite my sorry state. I was a young drunk college student, an immature lover of parties, naïve to the ways of life and movements of the Spirit. But I heard a voice and took a risk, despite it all. So please don’t let the church, or Ned Flanders or the god of Monty Python convince you you’ve got to have all your shit together before you can answer the call. That’s not the way it works.

When you step out in faith and take a risk, it is much like being pregnant. You are full of hope, yet uncomfortable and out of sorts. Your old rhythms are thrown off and you’ll be acting strange. Yet you’re discovering parts of you that you never knew existed. And you are expectant about the future.

Photo by **Andreza Vasconcelos** from **Pexels**

And so, here’s what to expect when you’re expectant. I share these examples, so that when the moment comes you won’t be disappointed and won’t feel like you’ve made a poor decision.

I remember hearing the call to enter the counseling field and as soon as I did I spent the first six months thinking about my former job and how great it was. I remember hearing the call to move to Detroit and as soon as I did I spent the first year in shock, constantly thinking about and missing where I used to live. I remember hearing the call to get married, and I remember waking up the morning after the wedding terrified and stunned.

When you follow the voice and take a risk, expect to experience almost immediate buyer’s remorse, trepidation, doubt, and discouragement. It’s the most normal thing in the world.

In the Bible book of Exodus the Israelites also received a call, away from slavery and into independence. But when they finally crossed the Red Sea, arrived in the desert and were totally free, they complained and yearned for the old days of enslavement in Egypt.

“If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”[1]

Their complaint sounds like it could have come from my very mouth: “Oh, the old days! When we were safe and risk-free! We ate so well and had so much!”

Aren’t we so nostalgic about our lives pre-calling? We quickly forget they weren’t as great as we remember.

Expect to be attacked by amnesia immediately, expect to be riddled with doubt and discouragement, expect to feel your confidence draining out of you.

But know that these experiences don’t mean you missed the call.

Things will seem odd and unfamiliar as you adjust to new surroundings, but in the newness, you’re still being sustained. In Exodus, God hears the buyer’s remorse of the people and decides to rain down bread from heaven to feed them. Every day they were to collect only what they needed for that day – no more, no less. The people decided to call this bread manna, which translated means “What is it?”

Likewise, I’ve experienced it several times in life: that when you enter what’s new you’ll feel tempted by what’s old. To look back longingly on the safety of the past and not realize the new trajectory life is taking. Despite daily bread raining down from heaven, I look at this provision and ask myself over and over again: what is this?

1. Bible, Book of Exodus 16:3

What to Expect When You're Expectant