The One Who Always Heard

In her family she was the one. Everybody knew it.

If a decision had to be made, somebody called her. If a cousin was in trouble, somebody called her. She would pray and something would come and she would say it plain and it would land, and she had done that since she was nineteen and she did not think of it as remarkable, in the way a person who can smell rain does not think it is remarkable.

Then a year and a half ago it stopped.

Not gradually. She can name the month. And since then she has prayed the way she always prayed, in the same chair, in the same way, with the same expectation, and there has been nothing. Not a wrong word. Not a confusing word. Nothing at all.

Her aunt still calls. That is the part that hurts most, if she is honest. She stays on the phone and she says wise, careful, true things, and she does not say the thing she is thinking, which is: I have not heard anything since March of last year and I do not know who I am if this is gone.

If the thing you were known for has gone quiet in you, come and sit with me. I am not going to tell you what your silence means. I have watched people do that to somebody in your position and I have watched what it costs.

I will not tell you what changed

Let us settle this in the first minute, because braced people do not receive anything.

I do not know why it stopped. Nobody honest does, and the ones who are sure about your eighteen months were not in the chair for any of them.

I am not going to tell you it left because of pride. I am not going to say you leaned on the gift instead of the Giver, or that you got careless somewhere, or that God is weaning you off something, or that He has gone quiet to teach you to walk without it. Every one of those hands the silence back to a person as a private failure with a spiritual name on it, and it does the most damage to the ones who have served the longest, because they will believe it.

You are not under discipline. Eighteen months of quiet is not God taking back what He gave, and it never was a verdict on you. That is not my opinion. The written word says that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance (Romans 11:29), which means He does not change His mind about what He has put in a person, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the sentence, who makes it live in a woman sitting in the same chair getting nothing.

Scripture keeps a season when the word was rare

Here is what steadied me on this, and it is not a method for getting your hearing back.

And the word of the LORD was precious in those days; there was no open vision.1 Samuel 3:1

Sit with that sentence. Scripture itself records a stretch when the word was rare and there was no open vision, and it does not blame the boy sleeping in the temple for it, and it does not blame the people either. It states it. It puts the dry stretch on the record as a fact about the times rather than a charge against anybody in them.

And then, later in that same chapter, a voice came in the night to a child who did not recognize it and had to be told three times what he was hearing.

You have not been disqualified from hearing. The Word treats a quiet stretch as something that happens rather than something somebody earned, and it never once put the burden of it on the one waiting. That is written down and kept on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a woman who has begun to think she broke something.

Your name is not your gift

Now here is what eighteen months has really done, and it is not about your ears.

It has gone after your name. Not the one on the birth certificate, the one the family gave: the one who hears. And when the hearing went quiet, that name started to feel like a lie still being worn.

Put that down. It was never the deal.

You are not that gift. You are His before you are useful, and you were His at nineteen before one word ever came through you. Scripture says ye are the temple of the living God, as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them (2 Corinthians 6:16), which locates Him in you and not in your output, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who took up residence there and did not sign a lease that depends on production.

And if these eighteen months have cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if a day has started to frighten you, please tell somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.