This is what it looks like to be physically on E while spiritually bursting at the seams. It’s not a flattering video, but it is an honest capture of an important moment in my ministry life. As much as I enjoy polishing a well-crafted written piece, I believe there is tremendous power in the raw, unfiltered testimony of someone simply in awe of what God is doing. That’s what this audio and video capture. I lightly edited the transcript for a cleaner reading experience, but I wanted to preserve the raw moment I recorded shortly after arriving home from an only-God kind of day. The edited transcript is below… with the audio and video also available. You know, I imagine that, for some people, it has to be kind of weird to hear me say, “God told me,” or “God showed me this,” or “I feel like God was saying…” And I imagine that, for others, it is probably annoying. Maybe that is because hearing from God is something you are craving… something you deeply desire to be able to say about your own communication with Him. Or maybe it is not that easy for you to hear from God, and that is frustrating. So, when you hear someone else say it, you think, Man… I want that. Honestly, I cannot blame you for that. I think the desire to hear from God… and to know that you are hearing from God… is one of the worthiest desires a person can have. I cannot tell you that I hear from God all the time. Even though it may sound that way to some people who know me or spend time around me, I don’t. And as sorry as I am if hearing me talk this way is frustrating or even discouraging, I cannot apologize for the relationship itself. This relationship is holy, and it is only because of God that I get to have it the way I do now. But I cannot tell you that it came easily. I cannot give you four steps to hearing God’s voice. What I can tell you is how it has happened for me. It required coming to the complete end of myself. It required being humiliated and humbled beyond belief. It required submitting myself to God more every day. And when I thought I had finally reached the end of myself… the end of my ego and the end of my pride… I had to reach the end of myself again. When I thought I had become fully submitted to God and His will, I had to become more submitted still. And I had to struggle deeply. I think I have a window into communicating with God because I have suffered a lot. I do not know that this is how everyone’s relationship with Him is cultivated, but it is how mine has been cultivated. Because I have completely lost myself, I get to be more with Him. Sometimes hearing God looks like a nudge. Sometimes it feels like a hunch. Sometimes it feels as though the text glows. Sometimes a word someone says jumps out at me, and I hear it almost louder than everything else. Sometimes it is simply seeing an email I had no reason to see. That happened with an invitation to a retreat today. I had forgotten the retreat was even happening. But when I stumbled across the email, something made me pause. I thought, I don’t know why I came across this today, but I feel like I need to at least pray about going. So I did. I cannot tell you that I heard God overwhelmingly say, “Go.” Sometimes, though, hearing God means there is no answer in the opposite direction. Maybe you do not hear, “Don’t go.” I cannot explain it exactly. I only knew that the email made me pause and that I wanted to pray about it. When I prayed, I did not hear an explicit answer. I heard plenty of worldly reasons not to go. Pain was an issue, and I did not know whether I could mitigate it. Finances were an issue, and I did not know whether I could mitigate that either. But both of those things are submitted to my God. I had not heard my God say no. Pushing Away From the Desk I want to encourage you… I do not think everyone has to lock in with God the same way. I do not think you have to suffer greatly or deeply to hear from God or to observe what He is doing. Sometimes you just have to pause. You have to do what I keep calling “pushing away from the desk.” Picture yourself sitting at a desk, working. You physically push the chair back and step away from whatever has occupied you. Whether I am writing, working on a project, or building this Spiritual Gifts Assessment… the more I push back and create space, the more space He has to work with. Yesterday, I decided to take a day off. I am unemployed. I am unemployable. I am disabled. And I still had to decide to take the day off. I was not going to be accountable to anybody. I was not going to check in. I was not going to make my rounds asking people how I could pray for them. I just needed to take a minute for Joel. I did not know what would come from it. I just needed space. I felt as though I had been going and going, constantly trying to accomplish something. And it is a worthy cause. I have been working on a Spiritual Gifts Assessment… helping people discover what God has placed inside them that makes them unique, powerful, and important to the Kingdom. I cannot think of anything better to do with my time, including the time I spend working while lying down. But yesterday, I decided not to do even that. I pushed away. I pushed back. I did not engage in much banter. I did not do anything. I just took the day off. Because of that, I was able to notice this email. Because I was not engaged in work, I left it open and prayed about it. I asked my mom to pray about it too. Then, late in the day, I made the decision to go. Saul, David… Bill, and Joel Two or three days ago… Tuesday of this week… I was sitting at my computer when I received a revelation about a connection between the story of David and the story of Saul that I had never seen before. King Saul was anointed by God, through Samuel, to lead the Israelites. That was a gift. It was an anointing from God to lead God’s people. The people requested a king, and God fulfilled that request through Samuel’s anointing of Saul. Saul received this gift from God… and squandered it. He focused on himself and on pleasing himself. He used his gifting to satisfy his own needs. Then came David, Saul’s successor. Once Saul had squandered his gifting and his anointing, God removed the anointing from Saul and instructed Samuel to anoint a new king. Samuel searched and found David. The same gifting… but a different heart posture. David was called a man after God’s own heart. His posture was to chase the heart of God… to be like God. Saul, however, was stubborn in his transgressions. He made mistakes and would not turn back from them. He would not repent, because he was king. The arrogance… the narcissism… the world revolved around Saul. David made mistakes too, but David repented. He chased God’s heart. He did not take his gifting lightly. David was also forced to run for his life from Saul, the current king chasing the newly anointed king. For years, David ran from his ultimate calling… becoming king of Israel. He ran because Saul was trying to kill him. But I began to see symbolism in that story. For a long time, I ran from my calling too. I ran because I witnessed what my predecessor… I said the wrong word earlier… what the person who came before me, my father, did with his calling and anointing. I watched him use it to serve himself. I witnessed the destruction that occurred around him… in my family, in the families that came after mine, and in the lives of people he communicated and had contact with. He destroyed so much around him. And he was once anointed. He was once anointed by God to use those gifts for the Kingdom of Heaven. When I was younger, someone told me, “You are gifted like your father.” Through my own therapy and inner work, I have come to realize that I am gifted in many of the same ways my father was gifted. I am anointed in many of the same ways my father was anointed. David was anointed in the same way Saul was anointed. That was the connection I had never seen. One narcissistic, anointed person squanders it all because he uses the gift to serve himself. The other runs… from death and from his own calling. David ran because literal death was on the other side. I ran because stepping into my calling felt like death. I did not know there was a way to do the calling right. So, for a long time, I stayed in the wilderness. I could not understand… or would not allow myself to understand… how I could use this gift without hurting people, letting people down, or destroying families and lives. It felt like too much pressure. How could I not mess it up? I am human, just like my father is human, and we are gifted in the same ways. Then I began to lock in on spiritual gifts. I began to understand my gifts. I began to understand why my father’s gifting, used to serve himself, blew up in his face… and in all of ours. That is not what God gave us these gifts for. Now, years later, I am creating tools to help people discover their spiritual gifts. And now I am receiving this revelation about the relationship between Saul and David… and Bill Barnes and Joel Barnes. I had never seen any of it before. Don’t Waste a Good Crisis Then I decided to take the day off and push away… simply to give God more room. Honestly, I felt like Joel again. I had been exhausted, tired, and discouraged. I just needed a minute. I needed a minute with God. So I took that minute. The email appeared. I went to the retreat. And within the first five minutes, the pastor said: > “Don’t waste a good crisis.” And I thought, What? Every time I experience a pain flare, I refer to it as a crisis. Part of that comes from my father having sickle cell disease. When his pain flared and he ended up in the hospital, it was called a sickle cell crisis. I have used that same word for my own pain situation… another kind of suffering I share, in some way, with my father. So, within five minutes, this pastor says,
