Speak, Lord for your servant is listening

So in the past couple years before the Race started, the Lord was teaching me that prayer is a two-way conversation between Him and me: a talking TO God as opposed to a talking AT God. Previously, I’d treated Him like a genie. Someone I went to when I needed something and I’d spout off my requests and then the conversation was over. I never stopped to see if He had anything to say in response. The thought never crossed my mind that maybe He wanted to say something back to me. I just used prayer at my convenience to dump my burdens on Him but the intimacy of talking to your best friend and listening to their input/ thoughts as well as presenting yours wasn’t present in my relationship with the Lord. But I started to see that in some people’s relationships with the Lord, they actually heard Him speak individually to them and they had a oneness with the Holy Spirit that I craved. My counselor told me that when He talked with Jesus, it was comparable to having a conversation with your best friend over coffee with give-and-take flow of the conversation. I wanted that. And growing in intimacy with the Lord and learning to clearly hear His voice were my top goals for what I wanted to get out of the Race. I was learning that the Lord is always speaking but we just have to learn to tune into His radio frequency so we can hear Him and that requires stopping to listen.

At training camp for the World Race, I was introduced to listening prayer. We sat in a circle and closed our eyes and were instructed to ask The Lord to bring to mind a word or a vision or a Bible verse that He had specifically for a person whom the leader had secretly chosen. As things came to us, we shared them and it lasted a few minutes. I had never done anything like this before. They encouraged us to step out in faith and not to be afraid of getting it wrong. As long as it’s scriptural and encouraging and comes to pass, it’s likely from the Lord. Most of us were skeptical and afraid of failure but amazingly the Lord met us there and gave us edifying visions/ words and some of the greatest skeptics became the biggest supporters of listening prayer by the end. After training camp, I went through a listening prayer introduction packet through adventures in missions for 25 days where they led you in what open-ended questions to ask the Lord and how to leave space and time for Him to respond. It really helped activate my listening prayer skills.

On the Race, I’ve tried to practice listening prayer and the art of taking time to have a give-and-take conversation with the Lord. I still doubt my ability to correctly discern His voice but He’s definitely met me there and every time I actually leave space for Him to answer, He comes through. It amazes me every time. He’s so darn faithful. He wants to know us intimately and He longs to just sit and have us pour out our souls to Him and just BE and converse with Him about everything, from the seemingly insignificant to the most overwhelming hardships. I’m learning how to do it over other people so that you can ask the Lord for an encouraging word and then tell them and lift their spirits. This is such a beautiful gift to give my teammates, squadmates, leaders, and whoever else. Also, before evangelizing in a certain village, our entire team would do listening prayer to ask the Lord to reveal any people or places we needed to go when evangelizing. Some of us didn’t get anything but we kept trying and the Lord was faithful. I wish I could tell you all the stories of how He gave us insight and then we saw our visions from Him confirmed when we met people whose names He’d told us prior in prayer or stopped at a place with specific details (a paintbrush, person roasting something over a fire, etc) previously given to us in prayer.

During month 2, the Lord really confirmed my ability to hear His voice and I heard Him more clearly than ever before. I was undergoing an inner healing where you have one person facilitate the session and one interceding (praying for you silently) and you basically ask the Lord what He wants you to talk about and then listen to what He has to say and He may bring up a few things. Your ability to hear His voice determines how much you get out of the session because the whole session is dependent on you tuning into what He has to say. It’s intimidating at first but if you don’t second guess yourself and just sit and wait expectantly, He will speak. Oh, He will speak.

During my session, He brought up the 3 main topics I felt I needed healing/ His perspective on. And it just flowed naturally and I didn’t try to orchestrate it. He spoke a lot about my Indian father’s death (I was 10 years old) and stirred up memories I had forgotten/ stuffed down and showed me where He was during that tragic season and His purpose in it. I know I never fully processed that, and I don’t ever dwell on it. So it was good to get the Lord’s insight on it and to process some things and receive healing I didn’t know I needed. It gave me confidence in my ability to hear His voice and really gave me healing in multiple areas of my life. It was so so beautiful. Mentally draining in the best way. The Lord is so so good to His children, y’all!

Okay, okay. I know what some of you are thinking. What in the world is listening prayer? And.. this inner healing thing sounds sketch. And trust me. I understand. I was there in your shoes 6 months ago. I was at training camp and wondering if I was even qualified to be a Christian, let alone a World Race missionary, if I couldn’t even hear His voice well enough to get a word for someone else. And then when they told us to ATL it before evangelizing, I was terrified. ATL actually doesn’t stand for Atlanta; it means Ask the Lord. So we asked the Lord for words or visions before evangelizing to help guide us in where we went and who we spoke to.

But I’ve learned that you should keep an open mind with new things in the Christian life. Don’t knock it til you try it, as they say. We don’t give the Holy Spirit enough credit in the Godhead. I’ve grown to appreciate His role more than ever. The Lord desires deep intimacy with you more than you desire it yourself. He wants to have a true relationship with you where you both speak and listen and You hear from Him in a personal way and fall madly in love with Him. So, if this seems foreign to you, I challenge you: ask the Lord to speak to you. Then spend at least 10 minutes trying to sit and listen for His response. Ask Him the hard questions. He can handle them. Ask Him to help you hear and distinguish His voice better. He is faithful and desires intimate relationship with each one of His children. And, really, what do you have to lose??? What you have to gain is so worth the fear of failure or of appearing silly. The All-powerful Creator of the Universe wants to spend time with you and develop deep relationship with you. The question you should be asking yourself really is: What am I waiting for??!!

Love y’all!!!!

-Raina-

P.S. If you want to practice listening prayer, I have a PDF I can send you that is via adventures in missions. Email me at [email protected]