Chapter Three: Contact: Listening to the Voice Within
A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and
more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening.
—Soren Kierkegaard
Out jogging one night in April 1999, I turned a corner, and suddenly half the starry
sky was breathtakingly visible. At that same moment a question popped into my head:
Would I be willing to be just friends with Belinda, whom I was no longer even in touch
with? Although I definitely hoped she and I would someday pick back up the
relationship we’d started to have three years before, I had finally stopped bugging her
about it, and I didn’t think there was any way she would contact me anytime soon. She
was too young, too shy, too emotionally damaged. So why was this very clear voice
asking if I was willing to be her friend?
Also, I had never considered being Belinda’s friend instead of her lover. Since she
and I had gone from teacher-and-student to the beginnings of romance in the space of
one day, we had never been just friends.
In any case, the question was clearly not my own thought. And since it seemed to
be based on the idea of unconditional love, I recognized it as a communication from that
benevolent being who had long ago let me know he ran the universe. I answered right
away, Yes, of course I'd be her friend—I love her. Then I spent the next few blocks of
my run turning this quaint thought of being Belinda’s platonic friend over in my mind.
But then it hit me that this meant I was going to have to be willing to be her friend
while she was involved with someone else. My answer quickly changed to No way!
In few more blocks, though, I saw that this was just the type of challenge I
should expect from the God who is love. And that rising to it—or trying to rise to it—
would mean I’d have to grow spiritually myself. So I asked God to help me do it, and
made up my mind to be on the lookout for lessons he might send to help me prepare to
be Belinda’s friend.
For the next couple of months, I worked a lot on this new project of learning to
be Belinda’s friend. There were so many things I needed to improve on! Mainly, I
needed to lose my possessiveness, and also to stop expecting her to be the “good self”
she had been back at the very beginning of our friendship. Even though I still believed
that good self was in there somewhere, I knew she probably wasn’t ready to be that
good self very much of the time.
Re the possessiveness, have you ever tried to quit acting possessive toward
someone? Did you think it would be impossible for you to truly stop feeling
possessive—that the best you could do was to learn to act as though you didn’t feel
possessive? That was definitely what I thought. I had no plans to change anything
deeper than my behavior.
To try to do that, what I did was to imagine situations where Belinda wanted to be
with someone else instead of me, and then practice not acting possessive in those
situations. Like I imagined her telling me she was dating someone else, and imagined
myself pretending to be fine with that when really I wasn’t. “Oh, that’s interesting.
Who is she?” I practiced saying or writing. Being able to act like this, instead of getting
mad and shutting down the way I had done in the past, seemed a good skill to learn
even if I was just pretending.
Don’t get me wrong here—when I say that all I did was practice acting this way,
I absolutely do not mean I didn’t ask God to help! I definitely did, and God definitely
helped. Otherwise, I doubt I could’ve successfully changed even my surface behavior.
But the point I do want to make is that although at the present time I thought this
was all I could do, years later I learned (as you’ll see when we get to it) that even
deeply ingrained feelings like my possessiveness could be changed, but only by getting
God to change my heart. At the present time, I hadn’t learned that truth, plus I probably
wouldn’t have been willing to try to turn my feelings over to God anyway, so at this
time it was true that I couldn’t change my possessive feelings. Therefore, I asked God
to help me develop the ability to act unpossessive in those imagined situations with
Belinda, and he did.
To me, this shows that God is always glad to meet us where we are on our
journeys, rather than expecting us to get to a certain point of development (or
“maturity”) before he’ll help. So I hope everyone reading this story will realize that God
will answer their prayers even if they they’re at a relatively unadvanced spiritual state.
One of the most important things I’ve learned in my efforts to connect with God is that
all God wants is for us to turn to him, and when we truly do that, from wherever we
are, God will respond.
As far as technique goes—well, in all this work I did preparing to be Belinda’s
platonic friend, I always took plenty of deep breaths, trying to relax into God’s power
and care, and then asked him to help me see my relationship to Belinda his way, as part
of the big picture, instead of my old way, which had been based on my small-minded
feelings of need or jealousy.
To stay motivated as I worked on this ongoing project, I kept reminding myself
that God probably wouldn’t have sent me the challenge from the sky if Belinda and I
weren’t actually about to have some type of contact, one way or another. It also
seemed just like God to have put the matter to me as a question, thus leaving it up to me
to decide whether or not I wanted to try it. (I had always believed God gives us free
will because he wants us to take responsibility for our actions.)
All this seemed to fit together so well that I began to feel downright joyful as I did
the work of learning to be Belinda’s platonic friend.
Around this time, one of the main problems in my life was that I was having
trouble getting a class to teach for the fall semester. Linguistics the previous fall had
been simply a stroke of luck, and once it ended, there wasn’t anything else they needed
me for. They had gone out of their way to offer classes to my friend Anne, who hadn’t
been with them very long either, and I wanted them to do the same thing for me, but
they didn’t.
I was upset and confused. I didn’t want to go back to teaching comp again, but I
didn’t want to give up my teaching career altogether, especially since I had gone to all
that trouble at LSU to become competent in the classroom. I tried everything I could
think of to get the administrator to change his mind—letters, phone calls, talking to
other people—but nothing worked. I also worried quite a bit, and not prayerfully at all.
It hurt.
By the grace of God, though, just when my worry was peaking, I went to the
wedding of a kid I had coached in swimming twenty years earlier. I had to go out of
my way to do this, because I lived with and took care of my elderly, wheelchair-bound,
Alzheimer’s-patient mother, and her sitters were off that day. But this family was
special. Kate Woods and her four brothers had all grown up to be doctors or lawyers,
and as adults they lived in the rural Mississippi county their parents were from, serving
the residents there instead of making more money working in a city somewhere. The
idea of going to the wedding just to get some inspiration from them wasn’t something I
consciously thought about, but I think my unconscious mind (which I believe is another
way God talks to us) knew I could use a dose of their energy, optimism, and good
cheer.
In addition to those sterling qualities, the Woods also had great senses of humor.
During the reception, I found myself talking to the mother of the bride as we watched
the bride and groom dance, and I remarked that this guy seemed much better suited to
Kate than her previous boyfriend had. The mother replied, “And the previous one, and
the previous one, and the previous one!” Ha, ha. For a “nice” girl, Kate had had a lot of
boyfriends.
A few minutes after that conversation, I started to feel as though the abundant life
these people partook of was available to me, too, if only I would open myself to it.
A little while later, the brother I had known the best, who edited and published a
newspaper on the side of his small-town medical practice, motioned to me to come sit
with him while he ate a plate from the buffet. All this modern-day Renaissance man had
to do was ask, in complete innocence, what else I was doing besides caring for my
mom and editing. I saw instantly that I couldn’t justify “Nothing” in my own mind, let
alone his. The only excuse I thought I had—that I was too busy—simply didn’t hold
water, because I knew Luther thought I was a more giving person than that. My
schedule still left me some time to somehow do something to serve the world.
I didn’t realize it till years later, but this altruistic outlook was the secret to that
abundant life!
In any case, the whole wedding experience was one of those times when I felt
such an outpouring of faith, hope, and love that anything seemed possible. (Have you
ever had an experience like that yourself?)
I knew my feelings weren’t going to last forever, but I recalled some advice from
C. S. Lewis: the faith and hope we feel in our best moods has just as much basis in
reality as do the worries and negativity that we feel in our bad moods. So it made
perfect sense for me to try to carry over my feelings to other settings, and to try to act
on them in any way I could.
Armed with this great tip for preserving my faith, I was ready to start living up to
the wedding euphoria by figuring out what it was I was supposed to do next. I started
soul-searching that very night, determined to pray, think, and listen to God until I knew
exactly what it was I ought to do.
To my joy, I found that this act of listening to God—and of opening myself to
anything God might point me toward—was not only the key to finding out how I was
to serve the world; it also made me incredibly happy in itself.
One day not long after the wedding, I was shuffling through my mail when my
heart practically jumped out of my chest at the sight of a plain white envelope, carefully
addressed and return-addressed in Belinda’s familiar tiny printing! At first I was scared
to open it. I got up my nerve only by deciding that it was probably some kind of request
for help, like a rec for grad school or something, and that God had prepared me with
the friend challenge so I wouldn't be offended.
Well, so much for that theory! Instead, Belinda wrote that she had temporarily
given up dating and had recognized the value of intellectual friendships, such as the one
she’d now like to have with me. Since, she said, I had finally “let that episode of our
lives [i.e., the passionate month] pass into history.”
Belinda had written out of the blue! Just because she wanted us to be friends! I
should have been nothing but thrilled.
At first, though, although I was excited to have heard from her, I was also
bothered because another thing she said was that she was still in love with Audra.
Audra? You thought Audra had just been a mean-spirited little drug buddy whom
Belinda would have been glad to be rid of? Well, I thought so too, but now Belinda said
that during the passionate month and afterward, she had “selfishly decided to keep
obscure” from me the fact that she had truly loved Audra. Now, she said, she was still
struggling to get her out of her system, even though they had been broken up for a long
time. Belinda explained that although Audra had been bad for her, she was “enthralled”
with her anyway—I guess like you would be with a wicked witch or somebody like that.
What bothered me so much about this was not really the fact of Audra but the
fact that it seemed to indicate that Belinda was being her cynical self. (How else could
she be enthralled with someone like Audra?) Even though I had promised God that I
wanted to be friends with Belinda no matter what she acted like—well, I had gotten
myself psyched up to be friends with her if she was involved with someone else, but I
guess I’d been assuming that if she contacted me, which was what had happened, that
she’d be her good self, not her cynical self. I didn’t realize she might want to be friends
with me even before she was done being her cynical self.
In any case, I still acted like I wanted to be friends with her. I wasn’t about to
pass up this opportunity to get us back into each other’s lives.
Another complication was that I decided shy Belinda couldn’t possibly have
written me out of the blue merely to get back in touch. She must secretly want things to
heat up again, but she’d just said that stuff about Audra just to protect herself. Yep, that
made lots more sense.
Don’t ask me why I completely ignored the fact of God’s friend lessons! I guess
I was just so excited to have actually heard from the one woman who had ever
reciprocated my romantic interest without worrying about being gay that that was all
my mind could focus on. I think the take-home lesson is how easy it is for us humans
to do really stupid things without realizing it.
Also, on a certain level I did remember the friend lessons. If I hadn’t, I probably
wouldn’t have given the letter the time of day because I would’ve been offended by
Belinda’s invitation for us to be intellectual friends. I would’ve taken it as an insult, or
something. So God’s challenge had done some good.
In any case, this tendency of mine to project my own thoughts onto Belinda’s
letters (instead of just reading the things and thus accessing her thoughts) was to
continue for years and do plenty of harm.
But there I was with my answer to why God had spoken to me from that starry
night sky two months earlier. (Actually, I think he tries to contact all of us frequently,
but most of the time we don’t pay attention.) And there I was with God’s response to
my commitment to the project of learning to be Belinda’s friend, even if I did seem to
be forgetting it now. Pretty soon, I started feeling really excited to be entering into this
new phase of Belinda’s and my relationship.
One more thing about the starry night sky. Most nights are starry, and even if
God doesn’t shout at us the way he did to me that night when I was running, the setting
is a great one for trying to “be still and know that I am God.” And then turning our
troubles over to God instead of worrying about them. I just go outside, or look out the
window, and take long, slow, deep breaths as I exhale my troubles into the Creator’s
arms. The key is to relax and trust that God will help if you just get out of the way and
let him.
By “get out of the way,” I mean refuse to allow your petty concerns—such as my
possessiveness, for example—to distract you from connecting with God.
A few days after I got Belinda’s letter, everything suddenly seemed to fit together.
I saw that the prayer relationship with God that I’d been working on all these decades
was itself worth writing about in order to share with others. That was God’s answer to
what I was supposed to do with my free time.
Over the next few months, as I tried to get the writing project started, I struggled
a good bit with uncertainty about the decision. But I think this type of questioning of
ourselves and God is a good thing, because it forces us to cement the decision in our
minds.
As I did this questioning, what worked best was for me to humbly ask God to
help me think clearly, and then to think about what signs there were that this was in fact
something that fit the big plan. One was that my heart was in this project the way it
hadn’t been in anything in a long time. Another was my longtime friend May’s comment
that she thought it was a great idea, since I’d “always been so interested in psychology
and religion.” Another was that an article I’d worked hard to tailor to a particular
linguistics journal got accepted for publication, meaning I could quit academics possibly
forever knowing I’d done something to disseminate my dissertation.
Talking to God about all this, I found myself submitting my will to the big picture
in a way I’d never done before. Instead of my former approach of “What do I want to
do?,” I looked at myself objectively as a small (but significant) creature in its own
particular position in the universe and asked, “What should this creature do?” This
radical switch not only led to answers but also made me feel more connected to—and
useful for—the world than ever before. I was tons happier than I had been all those
times when I’d wracked my brains trying to figure out exactly what it was I “wanted”
to do.
Here, the take-home lesson seems to be that listening to God instead of my own
little will turned out to be the way to go. I mean big time.
What’s more, I really think you can do it, too!