Heaven whispers. It almost never shouts. When it does shout it always seems to be in the aftermath of something horrific, like a tsunami or an earthquake; or that bright September morning when the Twin Towers were knocked down by hatred. At those moments, and for days afterward, Heaven is shouting. Not in anger, she is convulsing with us in a shared agony, as if to say, “don’t you see how fragile all of you are?”.
I am not saying that’s why these things happen. I don’t know why they happen. I only know that Heaven uses them, and that they are not her preferred way of getting our attention. God is merciful, and He is mindful that we are dust. If He were to remove the veil, and step into this place, we would all perish, and so, Heaven whispers. It whispers to us daily, but in our secular, materialistic age I think we hear it only as static. But it’s not static. Heaven doesn’t mutter, it doesn’t drone, it does not babble or speak incoherent spiritual gibberish, it just whispers.
When your six-year-old comes into the kitchen and asks who God is and you freeze; you freeze because what comes into your mind is bigotry or intolerance or jihad. Robes and incense and steeples float across your imagination because these are the images, the religious chaff of our time. So, you try to sound casual, you pretend that your daughter did not just ask the most important question in life (as only a child can, it seems) and toss out what you feel is a wise but weak answer; “no one really knows honey”. You change the subject, you move on, let’s make cupcakes, or whatever. But, Heaven just whispered to you, through the lips of a child.
Later, when the day is over, you sit thinking about your answer, hoping you handled it well, “no one really knows”. Then Heaven starts whispering again. No one? Really? Are you certain that no one knows who God is? That seems like an awfully critical assumption. The whisper makes you uncomfortable, so you push it aside, and begin catching up on Facebook, or are soon engrossed in a rerun of Grey’s Anatomy. That’s the problem with whispers; we can always act like we don’t hear them.
Heaven whispers a thousand times in a thousand ways into every life, and still we push it away. When a child is born, or when a song or a performance moves us to tears, and we are unable to articulate what we are feeling, but we would almost call it sacred. Those are whispers.
Sometimes it’s the pain of life; like when a lover breaks your heart, and you yearn for that perfect love that you have never seen but are certain must exist somewhere. Or when we see injustice all around us, and hunger for that perfect mix of justice and mercy that always seems to escape us. Or it may be the ever-present sadness; the melancholy that seems to be a part of all things, just below the surface, always demanding to be heard, insisting against all reason that this is not how things are supposed to be. Whispers.
When you are helping to bury a loved one or a friend, and the loss and frustration and heart-ache leave you exhausted and broken, and all you can think of is how wrong it all is; how you do not want anyone to ever die, and yet they do. Have you ever considered that we all live in a world where everything dies and yet none of us ever want anything, or anyone, to ever die? Where does this illogical desire come from? Could it be a whisper from another place? A place of no death?
Have you ever come across such a beautiful setting that you were forced to stop, and stare; to soak it in? it seemed both exquisite and excruciating at the same time; you wanted to reach out and touch the scene but you couldn’t and you knew, you just knew,that there is some intolerable beauty just beyond your reach, and you find yourself smitten by a burning desire for transcendence. What is that? Why are you repeatedly desiring something just beyond your vision? As if our souls are vibrating to some unseen tuning fork. You feel certain that if you could somehow step from here to there, in a moment, “in the twinkling of an eye”, you would have your heart’s desire. But you can’t. it’s just a whisper; so, you walk away, until the next time.
Listen for the whispers of Heaven; they are all around us. Stop pushing them away or drowning them out. After all; how many times can you tell someone to hush before they truly do? Can you really spend your whole life pushing someone away; a lover? A father? A friend? And then complain they never embraced you?
The next time that you feel that inscrutable longing, the tug on your soul. You can choose to push it away again; because serious people don’t have time for such nonsense, and you find these thoughts and yearnings a little embarrassing in our day.
Or you can embrace it for what it truly is; a whisper from another place, directed at you personally. Then you can get up and begin seeking the One who is doing all the whispering.
“behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper….”
1 Kings 19 (ESV)
© 2019 JD Green