Hearing the Voice of God

 This happened back when I was still a devout Christian. I'm not a Christian anymore - I don't believe in the deity of Christ and I don't participate in Christian traditions - but I do still believe in the same God that I had a relationship with then.

It was junior or senior year of high school. I was starting to really look into colleges and majors. I wanted to major in creative writing, because that was one of my favorite things to do in the world. My only worry was that it wasn't a very steady source of income. But I was a high-schooler, and less worried about that lol My second choice of career would have been an interior designer, if that gives you some idea of the pie-in-the-sky ideas I had back then!

Anyway. My show choir went on this long trip - we were originally supposed to go to Toronto to sing in a choir competition, but then SARS happened. So we curtailed the trip and only went as far as Lake Erie, then Niagara, then back down to Watkins Glen, and home again. It was a very memorable trip, for many reasons. But one of the chaperones that I spent a lot of time with was Don, my choir director's dad, who was a lovely guy. He was an English teacher, and at one point we were talking about majors, and I said I wanted to major in English, and he said, "Oh, are you going to teach?" and I said no, that I really wasn't interested in teaching, etc. etc. Then somebody else asked me the same question a couple of weeks later. Then iirc somebody ELSE asked me... and then I was reading Up the Down Staircase, which is a novel about an English teacher....

I was lying in bed one night reading Up the Down Staircase, and it suddenly came to me that this all seemed like signs. I had already decided that I would do whatever God wanted for my future. So I remember shutting the book, rolling over onto my stomach (I had a lavender pillowcase lol) and praying, "God - do you want me to be an English teacher?"

The answer was immediate an INTENSE. I know this didn't come from me, because I had tried many times in the past and many times since then to get this kind of a reaction from God or the universe or a magic spell and I never could, but this time it happened. It was like a loud noise, but instead of hearing it in my ears, I felt it in my chest - kind of like when the bass drum goes past in a parade. It felt like an enormous swell of music that just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger - Kind of like the end of Turandot. It was the presence of God, like he was shouting "YES!" in my ear, and the feeling became so enormous that I felt that if it grew anymore it was going to literally kill me - Y'know, Dogma-style lol So I prayed, "STOP STOP STOP! OKAY!!" and the feeling went away. I remember laughing and crying and being so thrilled - even though teaching was not something I actually wanted to do. But the experience was just so intense and profound - hearing the voice of God. I also remember knowing that this was a direction I was supposed to head in - that I was supposed to work toward being an English teacher for now, but that didn't mean that that was what I was going to do in the end. Just that this was the next step on the path for me.

I sometimes wonder why God wanted me to do that. I was later told by my art teacher that if I didn't major in art, it would be an egregious waste of talent, but I told him that God had told me to be an English teacher. I turned down other things to study education. In the end, I HATED teaching English, and went to grad school so I could get the credentials to teach college. I liked that better, but I also hated the culture of academia, and although I got my doctorate, I decided not to go into teaching. Then I went into a six-year-long period of unemployment and underemployment, along with a mental health breakdown and a physical health breakdown, and let's just say the last five years have been CRAZY. I'm in a much better place now, and in a job I like and a home I like (and I've started painting again!), and I have 6 published books! But I'm not teaching English or anything like it, and I do wonder sometimes how things would have turned out if I had taken a different path. I'm happy where I'm at right now, though, so I can't really regret it.

Anyway, this is one of the few things that really got me through the Long Dark Night of the Soul: I knew that God existed, because this experience was so intense and so unlike anything I had ever experienced before that I felt that it could not be gainsaid. And not only did God exist, but God loved me and cared about my future, and I was on the correct path, even if it didn't feel like it.