Hello! I have been under conviction for some time to share these three short stories of how God brought saving faith to people I love. I hope they encourage you.

The Park

One day I was at the park with my children. There was a Chinese woman there with her son, and I struck up a conversation with her.

Her English was very limited, so we could only communicate a little. But I understood one thing: she was lonely.

After a while, we went from the park to her home. I told her my friends would be her friends.

She didn’t need to be lonely anymore.

She was pregnant, so I threw her a baby shower with my friends from church.

Because basic communication was so difficult, I didn’t share the gospel with her. But over the next few years, we remained friends. Then one day she texted me.

She wanted to know about the Bible.

She knew I was a Christian, though I hadn’t talked about it much. So we began studying the Gospel of John together using a children’s picture Bible, my phone to translate, and even props.

I think the Lord smiled as I acted out ideas with my hands and whatever little household objects I could find.

Every time before she came, I fervently prayed that she would come to know Him.

And at some point, she did, though I never knew exactly when.

She and her family began coming to church with me. Her English slowly improved until one day she stood before the church and shared her testimony before being baptized.

She said she had seen something different in my love and kindness, and it made her want to know more.

Since then, her husband and son have both come to know the Lord!

She also introduced me to other immigrants she met through her English classes. Over time, I shared the gospel with them too. And a woman from Vietnam became a believer.

It all started with that conversation at the park.

The Library

I met a woman in the children’s section of a library. We were both there with our kids, and we struck up a conversation.

Over time, we became friends. Once, during a playdate, I shared the gospel with her. Then for years I prayed, and nothing seemed to come of it.

One year she invited me to her birthday party on a boat. It was on a Sunday.

I almost never miss church unless I’m sick or out of town, but I prayed about it. After praying for some time, I felt convicted that I should go.

During the party, her friends were drinking and some of the conversation made me

uncomfortable. But eventually she and I found ourselves alone.

She asked what I had been doing lately, and I told her about a Bible study I attended.

“I want to come,” she said. And shortly afterward, she did.

After all those years of praying and seeing nothing happen, she came to know the Lord through that study.

The Playdate

One of my children had a friend over from school. When his mom dropped him off, I invited her in, and we talked for a while as the boys played.

She was nothing like me in terms of interests or political persuasion. In fact, after that first conversation, I didn’t have much interest in spending more time with her.

But I felt convicted that I should invite her son along when we did things over the summer so he wouldn’t be stuck inside his house. So I did.

Slowly, she and I built a casual friendship. And eventually, I asked her to lunch.

While we were eating, she told me she had never believed in God or the Bible. But lately, she said, it seemed as though God was trying to reveal Himself to her.

Then she said something I wasn’t expecting.

“You are one of the reasons I think that.”

I shared the gospel with her over that lunch, and many more times afterward. She began going to church. She believed. And eventually, she was baptized.

I share these stories to encourage you, or maybe even to plead. Open your eyes to the people you bump into at the grocery store, at the park, at the doctor’s office, wherever you go.

The person standing in front of you is your ministry.

In any case, it has been in the back of my mind and has caused me to meditate and reflect on God’s judgment in my own life whenever I experience one.

As I was cruising on the ocean the other day, I looked out over the sea and was moved to worship in my spirit. The ocean normally causes me to do this. It is my favorite place to be, and I find its grandeur relatable to our God in so many ways I can’t even begin to name them all. When I’m on it, I consistently think of the Lord.

There was a particular situation on my mind that I was praying about, and I asked the Lord to give me clarity in it. I could feel my heart wavering in so many different directions because of it. There were too many variables that just didn’t add up, and I found myself struggling to steady my faith in the midst of it.

Immediately after I inquired of Him, there was a loud thunder and lightning strike in the distance. I turned toward the dry land and could see a storm forming off in the distance. Coincidental, I thought. But nothing is ever coincidental for me. The concept of His judgment being displayed through thunderstorms came to my mind again. I felt uneasy.

Because of this, the Holy Spirit once more moved me to ponder the nature of the thunderstorm and how He reveals Himself in it, as if He was calling attention to something that wasn’t quite right in my thinking of them in this way.

Later that day, turning to my daily chapter in Job, these few verses caught my attention:

He loads the thick cloud with moisture; the clouds scatter His lightning. They turn round and round by His guidance, to accomplish all that he commands them on the face of the habitable world. Whether for correction or for his land or for love, he causes it to happen” (Job 37:11-13).

I emphasize “or for love” here because I had never tied the storms to love, only judgment. Any other time that storms are mentioned in Job or Enoch they are tied to judgment.

And so, I held this notion in the back of my mind for the rest of the day.

Then, this morning, as I was reading through my son’s devotional with him, we recounted the story of Jesus walking on water.

After feeding the five thousand, Jesus dismisses the disciples to go before him into the boat while he goes up to the mountain by himself to pray. During his prayer is when a storm forms in the distance, and he leaves to meet the disciples in the middle of it. Almost certainly, we can conclude that the occurrence of this storm wasn’t a pronouncement of God’s judgment on the disciples, but rather, an event caused by God that would precede a miracle of faith coming to pass for Peter, when Jesus himself would come to meet him in the midst of that frightful storm. This was a storm formed for the purpose of Jesus demonstrating His love to Peter.

The storm forming in the distance during my own prayer quietly re-entered my mind. Rather than giving me clarity, He gave me a symbol.

Lord, I don’t always know the reason for the storm forming in my midst. But I understand now that You do not always form them for the purpose of judgment, but rather, You create them as a symbolic reminder of Your love displayed through them. You create them to remind us to exercise our faith, so that when You deliver us, we will be moved to worship You. You create them so that, like Peter, we might cry out, “Lord, save me.”

“He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply” (Moby Dick, p.84).

It caught my attention because Queequeg’s seemingly “premature” declaration of friendship here was not actually premature at all. He was making a declaration about a virtue he intended to pursue regardless of any reciprocation - a virtue that Aristotle would argue is the highest achievable form of goodness: Love.

Aristotle focused a lot on virtues that should be pursued as ends in themselves, the highest forms of goodness, pursued for their own sake and not for the sake of something else. As stated above, arguably the greatest of all these virtues is love. But for Aristotle, true love could only be achieved in friendship. Moreover, this friendship had to consist of two people, equal in nature, who view one another as equal in moral excellence, with a determination to pursue one another’s good for the sake of each other. This kind of friendship could not be achieved by king and subject, nor teacher and student, nor even in marriage, since all these dynamics may be tainted with utilitarianism or the use of another person for self-gratification. Friendship is the only dynamic in which pure love can exist.

The definitions of friendship that Ishmael was accustomed to were definitions of lower status, also articulated by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, and ones that we all probably embody in our self-described “friendships” today:

There are therefore three kinds of friendship, equal in number to the things that are lovable – utility, pleasure and virtue; for with respect to each there is a mutual and recognized love, and those who love each other wish well to each other in that respect in which they love one another. Now those who love each other for their utility do not love each other for themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other. So too with those who love for the sake of pleasure; it is not for their character that men love ready-witted people, but because they find them pleasant. Therefore those who love for the sake of utility love for the sake of what is good for themselves, and those who love for the sake of pleasure do so for the sake of what is pleasant to themselves, and not in so far as the other is the person loved but in so far as he is useful or pleasant. And thus these friendships are only incidental; for it is not as being the man he is that the loved person is loved, but as providing some good or pleasure. Such friendships, then, are easily dissolved, if the parties do not remain like themselves; for if the one party is no longer pleasant or useful the other ceases to love him. (Book VIII, Ch.III).

These friendships sound a lot like ours today. We choose to pursue friendship with people we find enjoyable to be around, thus utilizing them for our happiness, and we wonder why such relationships are so easily dissolved. We haven’t quite grasped the selfless nature of true friendship.

I found myself naturally drawn to the surprising parallel between this teaching of Aristotle and the words of Jesus; but what Aristotle needed an entire book to explain, Jesus perfectly summed up in a single sentence:

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Though the action imagined here is giving oneself in death for the sake of another, I believe it also pertains to a kind of “living” death in which you give yourself selflessly to another person for their greater good, whatever it may cost you. In the same way we might speak of dying to ourselves so that Christ may live in us, we also die to ourselves so that love in its purest form can be shown to others. Jesus skipped the philosophical discourse and went straight to the heart of it: The greatest love is shown in laying down your life – while living and in death – for your friends.

I particularly like the way that Benson’s Commentary explains it: “Man should be willing, not only on some sudden alarm, or in some extraordinary and unexpected danger, to hazard his life on their account; but on the coolest deliberation, to submit to lay it down for the preservation of their happiness.”

True love, found in friendship alone, is the promotion of another’s happiness in lieu of your own; the preservation of it at all costs. It is desiring their good at the expense of yours. It is laying down your own desires, laying down your own comforts, putting aside your own afflictions, and relentlessly pursuing the flourishment of another person.

I guess all this contemplation boils down to a central question I’ve been asking myself today: Am I capable of this? Am I capable of pure, selfless, loving friendship, in which I lay down my life and expect nothing in return; neither utility nor pleasure? What does that look like, practically speaking? How do I pursue friendship in a way that would cause someone to say – like Ishmael – that seems like a premature amount of love to give?

It repeated itself over and over again to me, beckoning me to ponder it, as if the phrase itself were whispering “Wonder about me.”

When I was a child, we were required to eat dinner if we wanted to stay awake past dinner time. If we did not eat our dinner, we went straight to bed, and we weren’t allowed to have anything else to eat, as typical parenting protocol calls for.  My sister frequently chose to go to bed over eating spinach. And every night that my sister would not eat her dinner, my brother would sneak into the kitchen and steal snacks from the cabinets to bring to her because she was hungry.

My parents weren’t blind to the situation. They knew that it was happening, but they didn’t stop it. They understood a greater principle at play in this scenario: the love of my brother for our sister covered his sin of taking the food. They proudly looked the other way each time it happened.

I then thought - perhaps -  this is why Soncheka in Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment completely captivates my heart.

Sonya embodies tragic, pure love. Her father is an ex-member of the clergy and a drunk. He neglects his family to drink at the pubs and cannot provide for them financially because of his preoccupation with his vices. He is a depressed alcoholic, but she loves him to a fault, as well as the woman he chose to marry despite her stepmother’s repulsion of her. Out of love for her father, Sonya decides to help him financially by becoming a prostitute, completely humiliating herself and selling every ounce of her dignity for his cause, trying to restore him to the man of God he once was. In doing so, she further becomes the object of her step-mother’s scorn and embarrassment, as her behavior affects their religious appearances.

Her father, enraged by the injustice of it all, cries out:

Do you think, wine-merchant, that this bottle of yours brought me sweetness? Sorrow, sorrow I sought at its bottom, sorrow and tears, and I tasted it and found it; but He will pity us who pitied everyone, and who understood all men and women, He alone, and He is the judge. On that day He will come and ask, “Where is the daughter who gave herself for a wicked and consumptive stepmother, for a stranger’s little children? Where is the daughter who pitied her earthly father, a foul drunkard, not shrinking from his beastliness?” And He will say, “Come! I have already forgiven you once. I have forgiven you once… And now, too, your many sins are forgiven, for you have loved much.”

Here is the same idea expressed in another way… that just maybe the notion of love covering a multitude of sins is not exclusive to the other person’s sins, but can even extend to covering your own.

Origen surely considered the same in his Homilies when he wrote:

"There is also a sixth forgiveness through the abundance of love as the Lord himself says, 'Truly I say to you, her many sins are forgiven because she loved much' (Luke 7:47). And the Apostle says,

'Because love will cover a multitude of sins' (1 Pet 4:8)."

An observation I have made in the Christian faith is that we are often cowards, painting everything strictly in black and white, unwilling to get our hands a little dirty for the sake of love.

And how much more of an abomination to shrink away when sin is not involved at all? “The wicked flee when no one pursues” the Proverb says.

There is a lot to reconcile here. I realize the tension between abstaining from all appearances of evil and what has been noted above. But one thing that should be realized is just that: There is tension in the Scriptures. One does not prevail exclusively over the other.

He goes on further to say, “It is evident that the knowledge you and I obtain from God comes through hard dealings, not merely from hearing or reading. If, in each matter, you have to deal with God as well as to be dealt with by God—that is, learning to have transactions with Him you will know what He requires of you, what He wishes to remove from you, what it is He desires to accomplish in you.”

I have been doing just that in 2026. I have been trying to learn how the Holy Spirit speaks to me, and part of that is learning what he responds to, so I can have more responses. I have had hard transactions with Him; some answered prayers and some unanswered prayers, and I’ve tried to learn through each one why I received a response to one prayer and not the other.

Responses from the Holy Spirit are like rewards to me. We tend to be otherworldly thinking when it comes to heavenly rewards, as if we will only procure them in eternity. But rewards are given to us on earth too, and one of those rewards is answered prayer.

This essay will be a work-in-progress, as I will keep adding to it various things as I learn them, and I’d love to hear your responses in the comments as well. We are brothers and sisters in Christ, a heavenly community, and the purpose of this is to share our knowledge so that we all get more of the Holy Spirit and His rewards.

Here it goes:

1. When I want to hear from the Lord for myself, His responses and answers are based on need. The desire to hear from Him must not be self-centered or pleasure-seeking (i.e. to make myself feel better at any given moment).

I have fasted and prayed for manifestations of His presence just to calm my nerves or to make sure He is still with me. Those prayers go unanswered, and for a good reason. Those prayers eliminate the necessity of faith. Faith is God’s chosen conduit for communing with Him. Asking Him for manifestations of His presence to calm us down is contrary to what He asks for in our relationship with Him. This resonates with Isaiah 58, where the Pharisees fast and then inquire of God, “Why have we fasted, and you see it not?” And God responds, “Behold, in the day of fast you seek your own pleasure.” (v.3).

2. Flowing directly from principle #1 is principle #2: He responds to my prayers that are outwardly focused, motivated by love, and sincere. In one particular case, I asked God to give me more love for a particular person and He answered it, and then He gave me a small reward of His presence as a bonus. I did not ask for His presence in that prayer, only that He would change my heart and increase my love towards a person I had a very difficult time loving.

We are all familiar with what the Lord says when we continue in Isaiah 58: “Is this not the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?...

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and He will say ‘Here I am.”

All of the things listed above are things motivated by love. When one is motivated by love, the Lord says He will answer.

3. He responds to raw and truthful conversations with Him, where I do not attempt to conceal any part of my heart. However, words must not be hasty and disrespectful, as in Ecclesiastes 5: “Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore, let your words be few.” (v.1-3). Oh, I get a response when I pray disrespectfully towards Him, and it’s typically not the one I want. I will open my Bible after a prayer like that and immediately be met with a Scripture like this one, and the Holy Spirit will convict me. If the Lord is withholding something, it’s for a reason. As Elihu rebukes Job, “Surely God does not hear an empty cry, nor does the Almighty regard it. How much less when you say that you do not see Him, the case is before Him, and you are waiting on Him!” (35:13).

4. He responds when I’m seeking Him diligently, with my whole heart, and I’m truly putting the work in on my end, as it says in Mark 4:24: “the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” It doesn’t mean that I’m neglecting my duties at home or my work, rather, those spare moments that I would normally be doing leisurely activities like watching television or scrolling on my phone, I’m redirecting towards Him and receiving an answer from Him. Why should God answer a prayer that I don’t even care enough about to spend time contending for?

5. The Lord answers my prayers when they are accompanied by a bold act of faith. As I was sitting in the airport one day, I went to get a cocktail before I got on the plane. I was accustomed to having one or two before every flight to help with my flight anxiety. On this particular occasion, however, I felt conviction over this, because I knew I had not been given a spirit of fear in the Holy Spirit. I resolved, before getting on the plane that day, that I would not have anything to drink, and I would instead pray that the Lord would give me the peace I needed to make it through. Before the plane took off, our pilot informed us that we would be hitting significant turbulence on the route. I prayed for our flight during takeoff, and I prayed to be filled with Holy Spirit’s boldness. We never hit turbulence. In fact, it was one of the smoothest flights I have ever been on to-date. And I don’t need alcohol to fly anymore, even flights with “significant turbulence.” This was faith “as small as a mustard seed” that resulted in an answered prayer.

This is where I will end for now. It should be noted that this list is not a set of rules or parameters meant to define exactly how God will operate in every case. “Our God is in heaven, He does all that He pleases.” (Ps 115:3). He can do whatever He wants. He answers whomever He wants and however He wants. But He isn’t just a completely unknowable cosmic mystery, either. You can get to know Him and His ways because He is personal and desires to be known. He is not constantly moving the goalposts on us. So, while I’m not going to pretend that I’m any kind of expert, I will instead contend that I’m a person who started noticing and taking notes. Hopefully this helps some of my readers, and as I said above, I’d love to hear from you as well!

At the end of February I was listening to Taylor Welch’s podcast, “The Deep End,” and I heard him share his testimony about how he learned how to “hear” the Holy Spirit’s voice in his life. He explained that his usual habit was to ask his wife to pray on his behalf and then tell him what the Lord wanted him to do, since she was able to hear Him clearly and he wasn’t. One day after asking her to pray about something for him, she returned and told him, “The Lord says you’re cut off.” Taken aback, he said “What do you mean, cut off ?” His wife replied, “He said you need to figure out how to hear His voice yourself.”

This resulted in a bit of an argument, since Taylor was adamant that the Holy Spirit just *doesn’t* speak to him that way. Reluctant, but needing answers, he embarked on a journey to learn how to discern the Spirit’s voice in his life, and it was his journey that impressed upon me the desire to also figure it out for myself.

One thing Taylor mentioned was that the Holy Spirit spoke to him primarily through His own thoughts, and this encouraged me. It made me realize that, contrary to what I originally thought, this was actually the normal way the Holy Spirit speaks, not through overt spiritual encounters.

Even still, up until a couple of months ago, I had the belief that the Holy Spirit was “always there” with me, but this was more of an abstract reality concerning His omnipresent nature rather than a truth I personally knew. In fact, I looked upon everyone I knew with skepticism who claimed that the Holy Spirit “told” them anything.

But this was dead faith. It was “dead faith” in the sense that I held this belief of the Holy Spirit’s presence but did not operate in it, as I did not correspond with Him throughout the day normally. I didn’t act like I had a real relationship with One who I believed was “always present,” nor did I think He could or would speak to me.

Because of this, I didn’t really know where to start when I resolved to learn His voice. The only guidelines I had to work from were that 1. He would show up in my own thoughts and 2. His testimony would align with Scripture. With these two things in mind I decided on the “childlike faith” method. I began treating the Holy Spirit as a real person that I actually spoke to and communed with throughout the day, and I started having faith that He was responding to me, even if it seemed crazy, like a child who claimed to have an imaginary friend.

I began performing the work of praying without ceasing and “taking every thought captive” to Him to see where and how He could be speaking to me, using James 3:17 and Galatians 5:22 as a guide in my discernment.

Then, something crazy started happening. When I acted on various thoughts that I thought were from the Lord *in faith,* I slowly started noticing little coincidences pop up that would serve as confirmation that those thoughts were not my own thoughts. I would ask Him questions that I would then get the answer to in a random way. I would think of a Scripture that I thought had nothing to do with me and then use that same Scripture to answer someone who texted me an hour later. And the “coincidences” kept coming over and over again in various forms. These coincidences began justifying the faith I had that these thoughts were implanted by the Holy Spirit.

It wasn’t any kind of “devout holiness” on my behalf that merited God’s favor but merely the faith I had that He was speaking to me instead of my usual doubt. Only afterwards did the justification for that faith follow. Indeed, it is the natural consequence of faith, since God naturally justifies His own work. But I also became acquainted with what happens when you become *too comfortable* that you’re doing everything right. When I became comfortable, I stopped putting in as much effort. Prayer times became shorter as well as time spent in the Word. When I suddenly realized the Lord was silent, I prayed fervently asking Him why He disappeared on me and He gave me Mark 4:24- “the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Basically, He was telling me that I got lazy.

The Lord is also SO COOL, because I was getting off-track in some very real, predictable ways, and each time I started wandering away, He corrected me and brought me back. I’ll give a couple of examples:

1. Naturally, when I began, I wanted manifestations of the Spirit to serve as confirmation that He was speaking to me. This is a pretty obvious snare that probably most people fall into. I now realize that this was really just a way for me to circumvent having faith, because receiving confirmation via a “feeling” completely removes the necessity of faith. The Lord also showed me the dangers of this in two ways: First, He specifically sent me to Ezekiel 14 and warned me that these manifestations were becoming my idol and preventing me from actually hearing His voice, and secondly, He allowed me to feel this “overwhelming fire” in a demonic encounter to show me that I was unable to distinguish between the Holy Spirit and a demonic one. After this happened, I was completely content with never receiving a feeling from the Holy Spirit.

2. In order to remove all possible barriers to having communion with the Spirit, I became obsessed with ridding myself of all “demons” in my life, being especially sensitive to it after the counterfeit Holy Spirit encounter. This became extremely burdensome and was stressing me out, to the point where I even contacted a deliverance minister. In much vexation and prayer about this, the Lord gave me Jude 1:8. I opened my Bible, went to the reference, and read: “Yet in like manner these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme glorious ones.” And this is how little faith I had- I read that verse and discarded it as if it had nothing to do with me. I put my Bible down, looked over at my bookshelf, and pulled Heiser’s book “Demons” off the shelf and began perusing it. A paragraph on page 261 caught my attention. It began: “Paul’s description of how he fights the strongholds of darkness includes neither exorcism nor efforts to evict territorial spirits. There is no confrontation of supernatural powers in his strategy.” There was a footnote there that I went to read. It read: “Peter and Jude warn their readers not to ‘blaspheme the glorious ones’ - Jude 8 & 2 Peter 2:10. Heiser then builds the case that these ‘glorious ones’ refer to demonic powers. Wow. And there it was - As if the Holy Spirit was telling me, Calm down, your job is not to hunt down demons and attempt to exercise authority over them. Your spiritual warfare is (as Paul says) to live a life obedient to Jesus.

Because of this entire experience I find irony in the consistent debate regarding whether or not you should “follow the Spirit” or Scripture. There is no tension between the two. At no point in following the Spirit was I ever led contrary to His Word, in fact, He kept bringing me back to it to answer my questions and keep me on the right path. My role was to acknowledge Him and have faith that He was giving me what I needed.

What I’ve also learned through this entire experience is that theLord speaks to me based on necessity, and I don’t get to determine what’s necessary. He kept speaking to me because I kept running wild off the path. Now that I’m securely placed back on the path, I don’t hear from Him as much anymore. But I have newfound contentment in the normalcy of reading Scripture, routine prayer, and hearing Him when it’s necessary. Chasing the supernatural can become exhausting, and it was never intended to be that way anyway, lest the simplicity of the gospel be completely removed.

As TLC famously remarked: Don’t go chasing waterfalls, please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.

I have started *many* fasts, and usually talk myself out of them midday when I begin to feel weak. I convince myself that I have completed the “purpose” of the fast; I skipped a meal for an extra prayer time or time in the Word, and that’s all that’s really required of me.

I don’t know why I decided to fast on that day, it was just a random prompting from the Spirit as far as I could discern, and I didn’t want to do it because I had a lot to do that day. But I have been praying specifically for the Lord to teach me as His student through direct experience of Him and apart from the multiplicity of books that I’ve come to idolize over Him, so I needed to say yes.

But I began the day with this prayer: “Lord, I have a lot to do today, and I am always weak when I fast. I cannot do what I need to do today without your strength. And I know for a fact that I cannot make it to the end of the day without supernatural strength. Please fill me with the Holy Spirit and sustain me.”

It was not enough to pray the prayer. Mid-morning, my head began to hurt and I anticipated that this was the beginning of my feeling weak for the day, so I drank water.

I immediately felt conviction over this breach of faith, as if the Lord was telling me I was not relying on Him for strength anymore, but water. I agreed that I was not trusting Him. I recalled to mind my previous prayer for strength and for the Spirit to sustain me, and added that I would trust Him.

Throughout the remainder of the day that day, I felt hunger but I did not feel weak. I recalled to mind Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees who “disfigured their faces” when they fasted, and thought to myself that such a weak disposition is the result of fasting on one’s own strength, and what I had always done prior to that day. I was beginning to see the beautiful juxtaposition painted into the practice of fasting: the way starving the flesh nourishes the spirit, just as feeding the flesh starves the spirit. I wondered if this is why gluttony was considered one of the deadly sins.

I had to recall the prayer for strength several times that day, mainly when I forgot Him. It was like He would temporarily allow me to feel weakness again so that I would remember Him and come back to Him for nourishment, and I did. I needed Him to make me feel well again.

I know several people who can fast for multiple days, and I’ve never been able to fast for one.  Full of humiliation, I knew that if at any point the Spirit decided to depart from me, I would not make it to the end of the day.

That day completely changed my perspective on fasting and what it’s for. It was a day the Lord used to build trust between us and reveal to me that I really could depend on Him to sustain me if I showed a small amount of faith. More than that, I asked Him to teach me as His student and He did.

I have always had “head knowledge.” I studied philosophy of religion at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I’ve studied theology, apologetics, and spiritual formation. But I’m realizing that I’ve been neglecting learning from Christ Himself and I haven’t familiarized myself with the Holy Spirit in a meaningful way, beyond the formulas I’ve learned in those books. But I am weak in the faith compared to others, and I’m writing this specifically to help anyone who may also feel weak in this area. Fasting is an invitation from Him to build trust with you.

Try a weird new thing where you step out in faith and try to learn by experience… 🙂

In my heart, I felt true sorrow and anguish akin to what is written in Lamentations. I remember being asked by friends and family what they could do for me, and I told them these words: “Nothing on this earth can comfort me.”

I lived and embodied these verses before I ever read them:

• Lamentations 1:2: “She has no one to comfort her”

• Lamentations 1:9: “She has no comforter”

• Lamentations 1:16: “My eyes flow with tears, for a comforter is far from me”

• Lamentations 1:21: “They have heard that I sigh; there is none to comfort me”

Thomas Brooks once penned my condition perfectly: “You slight souls that are so apt to abuse mercy, consider this, that in the gospel days, the plagues that God inflicts upon the despisers and abusers of mercy are usually spiritual plagues; as blindness of mind, hardness of heart, and benumbedness of conscience, which are ten thousand times worse than the worst of outward plagues than can befall you. And therefore, though you may escape temporal judgments, yet you shall not escape spiritual judgments.”

Though I was spared in large part from temporal judgments, I was wrestling with spiritual ones. I would awake every day to the weight of God’s silence afresh, wondering if the Spirit of Grace had finally departed from me.

I recall that this sorrow I felt produced in me a zealousness for change, not a despondency that would lead me to abandon all hope, so I deduce from this that it was truly Godly sorrow. And yet, I heard things like, “it isn’t true repentance unless you’ve sought forgiveness from the person you wronged,” “it isn’t true repentance unless you’ve gathered several accountability partners,” or “it isn’t true repentance unless you’ve spent x number of hours in counseling.”

You may agree with the statements above considering the underlying assumption: that there exists, beneath these actions, true sorrow within the heart that would naturally produce these “fruits” of repentance.

However, these statements also miss a crucial point: that all these actions can be performed without that underlying condition in the heart.

But I was troubled by these accusations and became more worried about my “appearance” of repentance than my actual repentance. After all, I did not want anyone to discount my repentance as “untrue” because the relative works had not been performed. To nobody’s surprise, I endeavored to complete the laundry list of items above, and upon their completion, I remained spiritually numb inside.

Perhaps, stemming from this desire to check off all the boxes on this list or pay certain penance was my desire to fast-forward through His spiritual judgments and be in right-standing with Him. I wanted, desperately, to know He was still with me. In much trepidation, when I was feeling most dejected, I inquired of the Lord regarding my condition, and I believe the Holy Spirit led me to this verse in Hosea and the associated commentary about it:

Hosea 14:2

“Israel, return to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled in your iniquity. Take words of repentance with you and return to the Lord.”

Commentary 1 - Take with you words, not the silver and gold which they had lavished on their idols; but what seems the cheapest of all, which any may have, without cost to their substance; “words;” worthless, as mere words; precious when from the heart; words of confession and prayer, blending humility, repentance, confession, entreaty and praise of God. God seems to assign to them a form, with which they should approach Him. But with these words, they were also to turn inwardly “and turn unto the Lord,” with your whole heart, and not your lips alone.

Commentary 2 - It is a very strange expression, however, and Archbishop Newcome may be right in preferring the reading of the Septuagint, pay the fruit of our lips, which is a choice Hebrew phrase (Isaiah 57:19). The ‘fruit’ is of course praise and thanksgiving, or vows of obedience.

This truth eased my trembling heart. What the Lord desired of me I had already given but I didn’t think it was enough. Why should it be? Should my mere despair, confession, and vow to change earn the Lord’s favor?

Bunyan gives this illustration to those who pray to God in their anguish:

Suppose there should come two men begging to your door; the one is a poor, lame, wounded, and almost starved creature, the other is a healthy strong person; these two use the same words in their begging; the one says he is almost starved, so does the other: but the man that is indeed the poor, lame, or maimed person, he speaks with more sense, feeling, and understanding of the misery that is mentioned in their begging, than the other can do; and it is discovered more by his manner of speaking, his bemoaning himself. His pain and poverty makes him speak more in a spirit of lamentation than the other, and he is pitied sooner than the other, by all those that have the least dram of natural affection or pity. Just thus it is with God: there are some who out of custom and formality go and pray; there are others who go in the bitterness of their spirits: the one prays out of bare notion and naked knowledge; the other has his words forced from him by the anguish of his soul. Surely, that is the man God will look at, ‘even to him that is poor, and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.’ (Isa.66:2).

Thus my conclusion was drawn: If one is sincerely troubled by sin, sincere in confession of it, and moved to turn to God with their whole heart and follow Him completely, there resides the fruit of true repentance.

I love how Gavin Ortlund puts it in one of his videos: “When you sin do Psalm 51 and there’s nothing more to it than that.”

Do not overly trouble yourself with the outward works that need to be performed to prove your repentance to everyone, your heart is troubled enough as-is. The Holy Spirit will guide you in your repentance and sanctification. He will convict you of performing the subsequent actions that will please Him in your repentance, but it is important to understand that these actions are not the prerequisite for His forgiveness, nor do any of these works merit it. The heart-work must come first, and it is brought forth by approaching the Physician with words that come truly from the heart in its current condition, and you should not bewail approaching Him, for the sinner’s self-condemnation “is the very thing that gives them the right to come to Him and to be certain that He will receive them.”

Be encouraged.

Sources (not cited in a scholarly way):

Gavin Ortlund, “Penance: A Protestant Critique” on YouTube.

John Bunyan, “Prayer.”

Thomas Brooks, “Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices.”

Martin Llody Jones, “Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure.”

Commentaries: Barnes’ Notes on the Bible, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

However, despite not “hearing” from God, people were still concluding that God was giving them particular guidance, and it seems to me that this was typically by assigning conditionals to a situation and then seeing them through.

I’ll give an example: In 1 Samuel 14, Jonathan proposes to his armor-bearer that they go to the outpost, trusting God would help them defeat the Philistines despite their small number: “Jonathan replied, ‘we’ll cross over to the men and then let them see us. If they say, ‘Wait until we reach you,’ then we will stay where we are and not go up to them. But if they say, ‘Come on up,’ then we’ll go up, because the Lord has handed them over to us — that will be our sign.”

Jonathan intends to act based on the result of a conditional that he has issued as a litmus test. There is no evidence in the text that God speaks directly to Jonathan that he will defeat the Philistines here, only that Jonathan acts according to his belief that God is with him based on the result of his conditional statement.

The same idea exists in Saul’s case later in the chapter when he uses thummim and lots to discover that Jonathan disobeyed him. It is noted that God is specifically silent in this case and yet Saul resorts to obtaining an answer by means of conditionals, which end up working in his favor to reveal the truth.

I also wonder if Gideon’s dew-and-fleece test could be used as an example here, but I’m omitting it as a potential exception to the rule since it is noted in the passage that Gideon specifically asked God if he could be allowed to test him and requested that God not be angry with him for it (Judges 6:39), which tells me that it would otherwise not have been proper to seek confirmation through conditionals in this way. And so, the conundrum ensues.

If we were to extrapolate the methodology of administering conditionals in order to seek confirmation from God about various decisions in our lives, where would we end up? Perhaps it could be argued that we are placing our faith in the Sovereignty of God to actualize the path we are supposed to take, but if this is the case, why issue a conditional to begin with?

Or, more probably, perhaps my theology is just lacking here, and there was more of a nuance to this mode of seeking guidance from God in the Old Testament.

I suppose all believers have difficulty discerning the Lord’s will in the midst of His Divine Hiddenness. It doesn’t seem right to abandon seeking God’s will in favor His Sovereignty, and it doesn’t seem right to issue a conditional and then act upon it without any evidence that it is truly God’s will.

The generic problem as I see it is that we often seek the Lord’s guidance open-endedly while remaining ignorant of the mode in which God is supposed to respond. At least, in these instances, they had a path forward considering the potential of God’s silence.