When we were serving on a ministry team in a large church on Brisbane’s southside, the church linked with a mission group called Servants to Asia’s Urban Poor. We formed a link with them to send missionaries to work in some of Asia’s large cities where many lived in poverty.

One of our young women went to live in a very makeshift home in a Manila slum where she ministered to her community. She came home after about a decade due to health issues. By then, she had no stomach lining left caused by constant bouts of illness. But she loved her neighbours and her work in the slum community. I’ve never forgotten an observation she made a little while after returning home. She said she missed the constancy of her communication with her Heavenly Father which she enjoyed while a slum dweller.

As she walked from place to place and house to house in her slum, there were immediate dangers, places to avoid and people to stay away from. She became accustomed to God’s Holy Spirit speaking to her, guiding her, as she went about her daily activities. Her safety and wellbeing depended on it. Now that she was back home in a more protected environment, the Spirit’s communication was less constant and she was really missing that.

Jesus said: “My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.” We may not feel in constant danger but, nevertheless, we are His sheep and our choices, activities and relationships should be guided by the voice of the Shepherd. And the Apostle Paul said that “those who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons (and daughters) of God.”

Recently, when I have shared what I heard the Father saying to me, it seemed that others doubted that I really heard God like that. But I learned as a child, through communication with my earthly father, that no question is out of bounds, that we can converse freely on any subject and a father is always willing to engage, sometimes initiating conversation with us, sometimes responding to a question or comment from us. My belief is that prayer is two-way. We speak and we listen and, together with the Holy Spirit, we build prayers that reflect the heart and mind of God.

A while ago, while on holidays, God spoke to me like this: Your daughter has a barrier in her relationship with me. If she will allow me to knock it down, she will be much more at peace. Tell her I’m missing her. I passed on the message to her and she acted on it but the last part of the message stayed with me…

            Tell her I’m missing her.

Do you believe Father would say that?

I sometimes get the sense, as I go about my daily run of activities, that Father is drawing me to just come and sit with Him for a while. It’s like He is desiring my company. I wonder why we get so busy and so distracted and why we don’t desire His company more. We seem to rush in and out of His presence, usually with our demands and requests, somehow forgetting that He has come and made His home with us. What a delightful thought that is! Dutch Sheets wrote a book called The Pleasure of His Company where each brief chapter shares some thoughts on enjoying the company of our Creator.

Back to my father and one of the last conversations I had with him before he died. At the time my husband was running a resource ministry for Christian leaders. On this particular day, I was working at the front desk and my precious Dad was in the back room doing our bookwork. As I sat there, a prompt from the Holy Spirit kept hitting my spiritual senses: Go and talk with your father. Tell him how much you love him and how he has shown you what your Father in heaven is like.

His generation of Aussie men was not effusive in expressing love and I hesitated. But the prompt was so strong that I gave in and went and spoke with him. It was one of those unforgettable moments in life as we gently connected, tears in our eyes. Just a couple of weeks later Dad died instantly from a massive heart attack, at the age of just 64. How glad I am that our times are in God’s hands and that I listened and responded to the voice of the Shepherd.

It is true that we can get it wrong, especially if we have a strong desire for something and respond to our own soul rather than the Spirit. And sometimes the enemy likes to trick us with a suggestion that sounds good but is off the track of God’s best plans and desires for us. But our humanness is no reason not to learn to listen and respond to God’s voice. He longs for that deep connection with us.

In the next blog post, we will develop this subject more, answering questions like: What are some different ways God speaks with us? Why does He sometimes seem silent? How do we develop this two-way relationship with Him?