When God’s Voice Is Hard To Hear
POST BY MATT MCCOY
5 minute read
We ended our last worship service on a rather somber note, by asking the question, “What does it feel like when we can’t hear God’s voice?” We came up with some sad, hard, and challenging answers:
In our worship service this coming Sunday, we want to respond to the silence of God with a distinctly Spring Church response:
When we can’t hear God’s voice, we pursue a spiritual practice with an uncommon friend.
Let’s go back to what is, quite possibly, the most famous passage in the story that is guiding us along in our Big Idea, Ruth 1:16-17:
“For where've you go, I will go, and wherever you spend the night, I will spend the night. Your people is my people, and your god is my god. Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. So help me God - only death will separate you and me.”
That Hebrew verb that I translated “spend the night” is often translated as “stay” or “live,” but it literally means “to lodge,” like how when a person is on a journey they might stop to spend the night somewhere. Or a person experiencing homelessness who has to find an overpass or a staircase or a tree to find shelter for the night. Ruth is not envisioning having a comfortable life with Naomi at all, and as we go through the story, we discover that things get worse before they get better.
But it does get better, and by 2:23, the story describes that Ruth “lived with her mother-in-law.” The Hebrew verb by 2:23 is often translated as “live” “dwell” or “settled down.” This describes Ruth and Naomi as having found a settled place to live, which is a huge improvement over simply looking for someplace night-by-night. How did they follow God’s leading?
As I’ve mentioned in the previous posts about Ruth, the story is without God’s direct voice, angels, or miracles telling the characters where to go and what to do. This makes Ruth an especially poignant story when we’re wrestling with what to do when God's voice feels hard to hear. Ruth makes this life-long pledge to care for her bitter mother-in-law without miraculous prompting (reread that sentence and think about your own family for a hot minute), and they go from living night-by-night to finding a settled place to live. The story demonstrates how she does this is with the Hebrew verb that is often translated “to cling,” but I’ve translated as “keeping close” because to cling has negative connotations to a modern reader.
This phrase “And she lived with her mother-in-law” would make a fabulous end to the story. Sit with that. The story of Ruth would be an incredible story if it ended right here. Naomi and Elimelek tried settling down in Moab (1:4), the men in the story die, Ruth the Immigrant Moabite pledges to live night-by-night (similar to a person experiencing homelessness) with a bitter mother-in-law, and she finally settles down back in Bethlehem. Lovely tale. Instead of ending here, this is just the halfway point, as the place of her settling down with a family of her own ends up being with Boaz as well. The Hallmark Christmas Movie of bible stories cannot end any other way.
For today, however, I want to keep the focus on Ruth’s action as she went about her ordinary, everyday life. There is no indication that she heard from God’s voice in the story, rather, she clung to the uncommon friends who were also walking in the direction God was walking in. The path from homelessness to settling down involved her clinging to those uncommon friends.
So let’s go back to the beginning. What does it feel like when God’s voice is hard to hear?
When we can’t hear God’s voice, we pursue a spiritual practice with an uncommon friend. This is how we cling to God, and each other, as we go about our ordinary, everyday lives.
This coming Sunday, as a part of our worship service, we’re going to be invited into learning how to pursue spiritual practices with our Uncommon Friends. We already started this at Heading North last week, and we’re looking forward to inviting the rest of Spring Church into what we’re already doing.
