Hearing from God and living the story
From a presentation at the Stronger Network Conference
Brought up in England and Southern Africa, Esther Grant met her husband, Jonny in New Zealand. They lived in the UK and then he became the vicar of St Paul's, Auckland NZ. They have now relocated back to the UK. Esther recently spoke at the Stronger Conference about her experiences of hearing from God:
I became a Christian when I was six. It was really an act of self-preservation as I didn't want to go to hell (I'd heard all about that) and we were in Zimbabwe and the Civil War was going on and people were dying around us.
As my life went by, I just found that I had more and more questions. When I asked for answers I was just told that I needed to have more faith. So eventually I just stopped asking questions. I was embarrassed that I had them. I would say that God appeared quite angry and distant and I internalized the belief from a really young age that He probably just thought I was a bit too feisty and faithless.
I remember during that time being in church and hearing people saying, 'God said this', and 'God said that', but no one really spelled out what these conversations would look like. I just took these statements quite literally and I spent years expecting that when God wanted to speak to me that His voice was going to be audible, that I'd actually hear him but I never did.
The first time God spoke to me, He wrote me a letter. He dictated his message to a lady who was listening and responding to his prompts. At that time I was in a black pit of depression and I really didn't want to be here anymore. I'd never spoken with her before and she didn't know anything about my life. I knew that only God could have known the things that she had written in the letter.
Some years later, my husband and I were told that we couldn't have children. I found myself not coping with this huge disappointment and it triggered me to get some help and so I booked in to see a prayer counsellor once a week. This marked a massive turning point for me because every week I got to share my struggles and tell honestly all the things I didn't understand. ;
In our very first session, the counsellor said something to me that just changed everything for me. She said, "Esther, you do know that God wants to speak to you way more than you want to speak to him. It's up to God to make that connection with you. You just have to be willing to be tuning in."
That kind of blew my mind. At best, I thought that God was ambivalent towards me and, at worst, I actually thought He was probably punishing me with His silence.
Over the next three months, I learned how to recognise some ways that He was communicating with me. There was no audible voice that I'd been expecting but instead the counsellor would just pray these really simple very matter of fact prayers. She didn't pray like she thought God might answer, she prayed knowing that He was going to.
One time, she asked Him to show me a picture and I just had this panic that, as I closed my eyes, my mind was going to be blank. But sure enough, an image appeared on the screen of my imagination. Sometimes when we did this exercise, the image would be really faint and she just encouraged me to stick with it and sure enough it would become clearer the the longer I attended to it. The counsellor normalized these encounters for me and I started feeling comfortable in this space.
Occasionally, over the course of my life, I had what I would call 'loud thoughts'. Thoughts that I knew weren't mine but I wasn't entirely sure where they'd come from. I asked the counsellor about this one day and and she said, "When the thoughts come, just ask God, 'Was that you? Did you put that there?'". So I did and the answer came back as a kind of knowing - I just knew if the answer was 'Yes' or 'No'. I realized that that was God speaking to me and that loud thoughts actually is the primary way that God speaks to me.
I look back and see that these breakthroughs for me in recognizing the way that God speaks came through a person who didn't wrap her faith up in complicated language. She expected God to speak directly to me and her conviction really emboldened me and dispelled my doubts. She helped me to listen to Him and to hear Him. She revealed the profound truth, which remains with me to this day, that God's speaking all of the time and I just have to say, "God I'm listening".
Esther goes on to tell stories of God encounters. Here is an example during their time leading a large Anglican Church in NZ:
"I was driving to work and, over to the side, I saw a guy walking and I knew that he had been struggling with depression and so I just stretched my hand out and said, "God, please be with him today." Next, this very loud thought comes to me and says, "Turn the car around, go back and tell him that I sent you to pray for him."
"There were two problems; I was really late for work - it was staff meeting day and I was now at an intersection where you just couldn't turn around. But I knew I had to do it. So I pulled off a hair raising manoeuvre and I pulled up alongside him, wound down the window and then I told him exactly what God had told me to say. As I said that, tears just started pouring down his cheeks and he said, "I have just the second told God that I really needed help, could He speak to me and you've just pulled up. How did you know?" He was in shock. I was in shock. I missed staff meeting that day but I got to pray with this guy on the side of the road who was actually at breaking point. On that day that's what mattered."
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From a presentation at the Stronger Network Confer, 29/04/2025