The anecdote below appeared in the introduction to my book Wake Up Call: Daily Insights for the Spiritually Curious. It’s now on sale at Amazon.
I first heard the voice of God in 1993. Or at least, I believe it was God.
I was living in Houston and had just completed a six-mile run in Memorial Park. The weather was overcast and misty and as I walked slowly to cool off, everything around me went quiet. A voice came into my head; one I swear to you was not my own. It gave me a set of explicit instructions that would lead me to move halfway across the country and reconnect with the woman I would later marry.
If you had told me the day before that I would take the steps necessary to make this happen, I would have told you “Never in a million years.” Aside from being just plain weird, it involved moving to New York City, near my childhood home, a place I swore I would never live again. But the voice was so clear and commanding, I felt I had to listen to it. I was certain it had my best interests in mind. I applied for an advertising job in Manhattan and got it. And a few days later, I packed up and moved to an apartment on West 90th Street with my long-distance girlfriend.
Ever since that day, I thought the voice might return with further guidance, but I have not heard it again—well, at least not that clearly and distinctly. I sometimes wonder why, but perhaps it was only to give me a needed course correction in life, through a message I could not ignore. It put me on a very different life path than the one I was on, and I have continued on that path to this day.
“The Voice That Is Great Within Us”
I was reminded of this event while reading the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr’s book The Universal Christ, specifically in a section titled “The Voice That Is Great Within Us.” Within that chapter, Rohr, one of my favorite spirituality authors, makes a claim so intriguing that it stopped me in my tracks:
God speaks to you through your own thoughts.
Rohr goes on to explain these are not the everyday wanderings of our mind but “intuitive truth.” It’s the voice within us that “prompts us toward compassion instead of hatred, forgiveness instead of resentment, generosity instead of stinginess, bigness instead of pettiness.” It’s the voice that propels us to both be good and do good. Yet most of us are not willing to call the voice within us “God,” because it feels too much like our own thoughts and feelings. Rohr writes that:
Most of us have been trained to write off these inner voices as mere emotion, religious conditioning, or psychological manipulation. Perhaps they sometimes are, but often they are not.
Rohr believes that “we often overplay the distance and distinction between God and humanity.” When the truth is God is closer to us than we can imagine. He points out “saints like Augustine, Teresa of Avila, and Carl Jung seem to fully equate the discovery of their own souls with the very discovery of God.”
This is not an immediate process, it comes with our own spiritual maturity. In fact, Rohr says that “It takes much of our life, much lived experience, to trust and allow such a process. But when it comes, it will feel like a calm and humble ability to quietly trust yourself and trust God at the same time. Isn’t that what we all want?”
Who’s to say that God can’t be found within us, in our very souls? To repeat a Paul Tillich quote I’ve used before, “God is not a being, God is being itself.” And God may permeate our lives in ways we don’t fully acknowledge. Rohr points out “the soul’s depth is infinite,” so vast that we cannot fully grasp all that it encompasses.
How do we know we’re really hearing the voice of God?
Rohr gives us three key rule to help us discern the voice of God:
- Anything said with too much bravado, over assurance, or with any need to control or impress another, is never the voice of God within you.
- If any thought feels too harsh, shaming, or diminishing of yourself or others, it is not likely the voice of God.
- If something comes toward you with love and grace and can pass through you and toward others with love and grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.
He also asks us to consider: “Why do humans so often presume that shaming voices are always from God, and grace voices are always the imagination?” The Divine may be more a part of our everyday lives than we imagine, just waiting for our recognition and acknowledgement. As a friend once told Rohr:
We must listen to what is supporting us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us.
As we grow older, and our intuition grows stronger.
In a 2025 issue of AARP magazine, Laura L. Carstensen, professor of Psychology at Stanford, says that our intuitive abilities are amplified with age. Research suggests that as we accumulate experiences, we are better able to “find the signal and ignore the noise.” Much like we might use the dial to tune into an FM station on an old-school radio.
Although I’ve never encountered a voice as clear and distinct as the one I heard in the park that day, I can often discern a quieter voice within. This voice gently nudges me and guides me. I am guessing you’ve experienced it, too. As Roth emphasized, it’s a voice we should heed: “We need the courage and humility to trust the voice of God within.” There may be no more valuable advice we’ll receive in this life.
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