God Speaks: A Dialogue

 For years, writing lived within me like a room I kept walking past. I sensed that God had placed something inside me, but fear, responsibility, and questions about my worthiness kept me from fully surrendering to it.

I knew it was there.

I had always known.

Some lines came to me. Thoughts. Poems. Half-shaped stories. Sentences that seemed to arrive before I had reasoned my way to them. Sometimes I wrote them down. Sometimes I let them pass. Sometimes I told myself I would return to them when life settled down.

Life rarely settles down.

It changes costumes.

Work becomes family. Family becomes crisis. Crisis becomes recovery. Recovery becomes duty. Duty becomes habit. And somewhere underneath it all, the quiet thing God placed inside you keeps waiting for you to stop calling delay wisdom.

Writing had been waiting in me for years.

I wrote, but not with full permission.

I listened, but not with full surrender.

I sensed, but I did not build my life around what I sensed.

That is a painful thing to admit because it means I knew enough to be responsible for my hesitation. I was no longer the boy who did not understand the call. I was no longer the teenager frightened by the word preacher. I was a grown man who had heard God on a walking path and knew I was not alone.

Still, I delayed.

That may be one of the clearest signs of resistance. You can know God is real and still keep back the part of yourself He is asking for.

I did that with writing.

Part of it was fear.

Fear rarely introduces itself honestly. It does not usually say, "I am fear, and I have come to keep you from obeying God."

It sounds more reasonable than that.

Who do you think you are?

What if you are wrong?

What if nobody understands?

What if the words are not good enough?

What if you give yourself to this and nothing comes of it?

What if the thing that feels most alive in you becomes the place where you are most exposed?

Those questions followed me.

Writing is strange work because it can look like nothing while it is being born. A person sits alone, typing words no one else can see yet, rearranging sentences, throwing whole pages away, listening for something inward that may or may not survive the page. There is no applause while it is happening. No proof. No congregation nodding. No visible outcome.

Just the page.

And the silence.

And whatever truth you are willing to tell.

For someone like me, that was risky.

I had spent a lifetime learning to manage what people saw. Writing asked me to stop managing. Real writing does that. It does not tolerate all your disguises. It may let you keep them for a while, but sooner or later, the page knows when you are pretending.

I could write clever things.

I could write polished things.

I could write spiritual-sounding things.

But God was not calling me to sound spiritual.

He was calling me to tell the truth.

That is harder.

By 2006, I had made several major changes in my life. One of them was moving to the beach, a dream I had carried for a long time. Something about living near water feels like permission to listen. The tide keeps its own rhythm. The horizon gives the eye somewhere to rest. The sound of waves can loosen ordinary thoughts.

I was turning forty-nine.

That number mattered to me, though I did not yet understand how deeply. Forty-nine sits at the edge of Jubilee—the year of release, return, rest, and restoration. I did not wake up that day with a full theology of it. I woke up with a birthday, a house near the sea, and a quiet desire to finish something I had started.

I made a cup of tea.

I sat in my oversized chair.

I opened my laptop.

There was a document I had ignored for too long. When the screen settled, I opened it and saw more there than I remembered: twenty-something typed pages. I began reading and felt a little surprised.

It was good.

At least, I thought it was.

Elegant. Refined. Carefully shaped. The kind of writing that makes a person sit back and nod with pride because something inside says, Maybe I can do this after all.

Pride is not always loud.

Sometimes it is just a pleased little warmth in the chest.

I started typing.

Then I heard something.

At first, I thought it was wind. A rush. A sound that pulled my attention away from the screen. I stopped and looked around. No windows were open. I was alone in the house.

I took a sip of tea and returned to the page.

Then it came again.

This time, I sat still.

I listened more carefully.

It was not wind.

It was a voice.

At first, 

I had to strain to hear it, but the words became clear.

"Nice book."

I froze.

The Voice was familiar.

I knew it.

Not because I heard it every day. Not because I could summon it. Not because it had become ordinary. But because fourteen years earlier, on that path, I had heard the same Voice answer my anger with a question.

"And what would you have Me say?"

Now, in 2006, the Voice had come again.

"Nice book."

I smiled, maybe with too much pride.

Then came the rest.

"Erase it. It's a nice book, but it isn’t mine."

The words landed softly and sharply at the same time.

That is how truth often lands.

Soft enough that it does not crush you.

Sharp enough that you cannot pretend you did not hear it.

I looked at the screen.

My work was there. My sentences. My effort. My polish. My little offering of competence. It looked good to me. Maybe it was good in a certain way. But that was the problem.

It was mine.

Not His.

I argued, though I already knew the argument had no strength.

"But I've typed over twenty pages."

That was the whole defense.

Twenty-something pages.

As though volume could outweigh obedience.

As though effort could sanctify what God had not breathed on.

As though my attachment to the work mattered more than the One who was asking for it.

The answer came again.

"Erase it."

There are moments when obedience becomes embarrassingly practical.

No drama.

No altar.

No witnesses.

Just fingers on a keyboard.

I pressed Ctrl + A.

The whole document turned blue.

Then I pressed Delete.

Gone.

Months of polish.

Pages of effort.

Sentences I had admired five minutes earlier.

Gone.

I stared at the blank page.

A strange thing happened then.

I did not feel empty.

I felt open.

That surprised me. I had expected grief, panic, maybe regret. Instead, stillness filled the space where my pride had been.

Then the words began.

They did not come with effort. They came like flow. I typed faster than I had ever typed before. Sentences arrived whole. Thoughts opened into other thoughts. The screen filled. The day moved around me, but I barely noticed it.

I was not forcing.

I was receiving.

There is a difference.

I don't want to make this sound cheaply magical. It was not a trick. It was not automatic writing. It was not me disappearing from the room. I was present. My hands typed. My mind engaged. My heart listened. But the source felt deeper than my usual process.

The Voice had not dictated.

The Voice had invited.

And once I erased what was merely mine, something else had room to come through.

I started around ten in the morning.

I finished around nine-thirty that evening.

No hunger pulled me away. No fatigue stopped me. No ordinary distraction gained much power. I typed until the work was complete.

When it was done, I sat there with the strange quiet that comes after birth.

Something had arrived.

The title was there.

God Speaks: A Dialogue.

I looked at it and knew it had not come from the same place as the pages I had erased.

This was different.

This was not my book in the way the first one had been mine.

It had moved through me.

That distinction changed my life.

Ambition says, "Look what I made."

Stewardship says, "Look what I was trusted to carry."

Before that day, writing still had too much ambition tangled in it. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be seen as good. I wanted the work to prove something about me. That is human. I do not condemn the younger version of myself for it.

But God was not trying to make me impressive.

He was trying to make me obedient.

That day, writing became stewardship.

Once the document was saved, I needed to move. I left the house and walked the two blocks to the beach. The air felt different. Or maybe I did. My body carried the charge of what had just happened. My mind was awake. My heart felt full and unsettled, as if the world had become larger in a single day.

I reached the sand.

My toes sank in as I walked toward the incoming tide.

The beach at night has its own kind of honesty. The water does not flatter you. The horizon does not adjust itself for your mood. The waves come in and go out whether you understand your life or not.

I stood there and looked up.

"Is that what You wanted?"

That was my question.

No anger this time.

No accusation.

No demand for God to defend Himself.

Just a man standing at the edge of the water after surrendering twenty-something pages and receiving a book in return.

"Is that what You wanted?"

Then two lights streaked across the sky.

East to west.

Together.

They crossed the dark like an answer.

I will not tell the reader what to make of that. I know what I made of it.

I received it as God's yes.

His amen.

His quiet confirmation that the work was not only finished, but accepted.