They say that the sheep know the Shepherd’s voice. It’s a still voice and it’s small. I’ve listened for it sometimes. Or tried to anyway. I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to get my mind quiet enough to really hear it. My thoughts never seem to want to shut the hell up.
When I was twenty-four years old, I attended a conference called the School of Power and Love. The School of Power and Love centered around the idea that, when a person surrenders their life to Christ, they are bestowed with supernatural gifts. Like any other gift, it might not be immediately apparent how one is meant to use it. The School of Power and Love’s goal was to teach anyone willing to learn.
This wasn’t a culture I’d been raised in. When I was young, the church I grew up in was Baptist. At some point I don’t recall, they transitioned to a generic, non-denominational evangelical church. In any case, they were cessationists and they believed that miracles — such as healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues — had ceased the moment the entirety of scripture had been written.
It always struck me as a convenient stance — if you don’t believe in miracles, you never have to ask yourself why you don’t see them — but I’m not convinced anyone who affirms the Bible’s miracles is ever really a hardline cessationist. I’d heard too many claiming God had told them one thing or another. I had to wonder: if God had spoken to them, why would there be a limit to what He could say?
So, I’d been wanting to hear God’s voice.
My friend Bryan and I were eating lunch at Burger King after the first morning’s session, elbows propped on the soda-slick tabletop, Whoppers gripped in our hands. Bryan had been hanging around an organization called IHOP (the International House of Prayer) in Kansas City that was all miracles and holy laughter, and it was his first time in New England. There was a gas station next door, and he felt inspired to walk over and offer to pay for people’s gas.
“I don’t think this is going to go the way you’re picturing it,” I told him.
There were four pumps and a car at each of them. A man leaned against a shonky, black four-door at the nearest pump, his eyes locked on the rapid tick of numbers. We walked up, and I let Bryan do the talking.
“Excuse me, sir? We were wondering if we could pay for your gas today.”
The man knit his brow and gave us a sidelong glance, never turning his face toward us.
“Nah, I’m good,” he said.
After the other three patrons turned down Bryan’s generosity, we went and stood on the curb in front of lottery decals plastering the gas station’s window and waited for new cars to pull up. We hadn’t been standing there long before the gas station attendant came out and asked us what we were doing. There was more than a hint of accusation in his voice.
Bryan smiled at the man and said, “We’re just trying to bless people by paying for their gas.”
The man frowned and waved his hand and said, “You cannot do that here. You must leave.”
So, we did.
“Welcome to New England,” I said.
Each day after lunch, attendees filed down the church aisles to the stage awaiting their chance with the microphone. Men in cargo shorts with tattoos from ankles to knees recounted how God had directed their steps and their words, pulling them from taco bowls with their friends to the sidewalks of Blue Back Square, giving them specific unknowable truths about whomever they encountered there. Women in thunderbolt tanktops told of revelations of lower lumbar pain in cashiers, the incredulity the cashier expressed at their knowledge, and even further amazement as the pain vanished in the span of a single prayer.
I couldn’t help comparing these with my own experiences.
Each day I went out with a different group of people, hoping someone among them would have a greater sensitivity to the voice of God than I had. Instead, I witnessed my companions asking about pains that did not exist. No one was offended by their asking. In the end, we might have discovered there was some other ailment than the one my companions specified, and we would pray for that ailment to be healed instead. Before my eyes, no ailment ever was.
On the final morning, the lecturer spoke on Words of Knowledge. These were the little glimpses of truth you couldn’t be expected to know about a person. It involved the critical element of knowing the Shepherd’s voice, discerning it from your own, and having the courage to speak it. To act upon it. I wanted to hear that voice. I wanted to know it wasn’t just my own voice trying to disguise itself as God’s. The lecturer announced that he needed three volunteers.
“Who here has never received a Word of Knowledge from the Lord?”
My hand shot up.
“You,” he said, and I instantly regretted my decision.
I dragged myself to the front of the auditorium, up the steps to the stage, and waited for two other volunteers to join me.
“Here’s how it’s going to work,” the lecturer said. “I’m going to pray, and, as I pray, God is going to give each of you a word. You’ll experience it as one of three things: a sensation somewhere on your body, an image, or a literal word. Each of you will experience one of these that none of the others will experience. Are you ready?”
The man began to pray and, as he prayed, my heart raced. I prayed, too, asking God to give me something to keep me from looking like a fool in front of all those people. As the man’s prayer came to a close, I felt like I had nothing but the galloping of my heart.
“Okay,” he said. “Which of you received a sensation in your body?”
I waited a moment for someone else to speak up, but no one did. Alright, I thought, maybe it was me.
“My heart’s beating real fast,” I offered.
The lecturer laughed and said it was just nerves.
The girl beside me said she had a tingling in her right elbow. It would have been nice if she had been a little quicker with that reveal. The lecturer asked if anyone in the room had a condition with their right elbow, and a man raised his hand and came up to the stage. The girl laid her hands on the man. They solemnly bowed their heads as she prayed. I tried to feel a change in the room’s energy, a flash of current that would signify the passing of God’s spirit. But I was locked in my mind, shut out from whatever they were experiencing. They raised their heads, and the lecturer asked the man how his elbow felt. He said it felt 100% better, and the audience clapped, and the man and the girl who had prayed for him returned to their seats.
Now, the lecturer asked the other volunteer what he had received from the Lord. Perhaps to give me the opportunity to figure out what I was supposed to have received. The other volunteer, it turned out, had received an image. So, when the lots were cast, I was the one who needed to hear the voice of God. Someone else came to the stage, the volunteer prayed, the person was healed, and I was exposed and alone with the lecturer in front of the room.
“That leaves you,” he said with a sparkle in his eye. “What word did God speak to you?”
I told him I honestly hadn’t felt like I heard any word, and he said, “That’s alright. I’ll pray again, and this time you’ll know to listen for a word. You might even feel like you’re making it up but don’t worry about that. That’s how it feels sometimes. Dear Heavenly Father…”
Once again, I asked God to give me a word. I tried to silence the stream of my consciousness, but the babbling cmoncmoncmon of my mind would not cease and, as the prayer was drawing to its close, there was no voice other than my own floating around my head. It said, knee. And I said, which knee? And it said, left knee.
That’ll work.
He asked what word I had received, and I told him what my own voice had told me.
“Does anyone here have pain in their left knee?”
I looked to see if anyone would move. A man in a polo shirt with horseshoe pattern baldness approached the stage. A moment later, another man with close-cropped hair followed him down the aisle. The others’ words had been so specific, only one person in the room had identified with their prompt. I was facing down two and I recognized them both. The balding man was one of the School of Power and Love’s teachers, Joe, and the other was a friend of a friend named Rob.
“Alright,” said the lecturer. “God saved the best for last.”
He reiterated the instructions he’d already given twice before: that I was to pray for them, and they were to be healed. There’s no secret formula. It’s simply a petition to a loving God. He’s not like one of those middle school teachers you’d ask if you can go to the bathroom, and they’d say “I don’t know. Caaaan you?”
I laid my hands on their knees. Inches from my mouth, the microphone felt like the lenses of a thousand news cameras, a record to be reviewed by future theologians able to judge the condition of my soul by the outcome of my prayer. I don’t remember the exact words I spoke. It isn’t supposed to matter. The prayer was brief and to the point and requested total healing in the legs of the two men before me.
When I’d said “Amen,” the lecturer asked them if their knees felt any better. They made uneasy eye contact and shook their heads.
“That’s okay,” said the lecturer. “Sometimes the first prayer doesn’t stick. The timing of the Lord is a mystery, after all. So, we’re just going to pray again.”
And I did. I put a little more effort into the second prayer. Internally, I cried out for God to intervene. I believe, I said. I know You can do this. Please, just do this.
“How do your knees feel?”
I went through the rest of the day in a daze. During the lunch break, I paired up with Bryan again, and we found ourselves scanning the aisles of a mini-mart. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but Bryan was looking for people with whom God had unfinished business. The sun glinted off the blacktop through a pair of automatic doors and silhouetted an old lady picking through canned vegetables at the aisle cap. Bryan nudged me.
“Go give her a word.”
“I don’t have a word for her.”
“Then make one up.”
“No, man. I won’t do that,” I said. Not again.
After three days at the conference, we crept back from that last lunch with nary a miracle between us. We sat through more testimonies that assured us God was moving, if not through us then at least through someone else. The last paid session’s speaker was Todd White, a bit of a big shot in certain charismatic circles. With a pony full of dreads and a gym rat physique, he eschewed the stereotypical appearance of an evangelist. Still, he had come to preach.
“I was given a pure, blank canvas,” he said. “And in the eight years since I met Jesus, I haven’t violated it once. I have not sinned once in a day since I met him.”
I couldn’t listen to another word.
There was so much I believed God could do, yet this struck me as too much. Maybe it was because, in two thousand years of church history, I didn’t know of anyone else who could make such a claim. Maybe it was because it required me to take this stranger at his word. And maybe, most especially, it was because it implied that, if sin still snuck into my life, it meant that I didn’t love Jesus enough.
That evening, there was a final service, open to the public, but I couldn’t stomach it. Instead, I reclined in the driver’s seat of my Dodge Caravan, the girl I was dating at the time sitting shotgun, and tried to figure out what the hell I was supposed to make of my faith after three days of nothing.
“I thought the School of Power and Love was going to reveal something to me,” I said. “I feel like Thomas, coming back to the upper room, and all the other disciples are telling me they’ve just seen Jesus.”
“Well,” she said, dropping her Long Island accent the way she always did when she offered consolation. “Some people need to see miracles to believe. Maybe God knows you don’t need to see them to have faith.”
I nodded. Maybe. But that felt as convenient a belief as the cessationism I’d grown up with.
Insect trill sawed the air —cicada, cricket, and katydid — creamy pinks and oranges smudged the surface of a violet sky. My buddy Ray rapped his knuckles on my window.
“They’re looking for you. They just called your name from the stage.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But they’re trying to figure out if you’re still here.”
I wandered into the church atrium and peeked through the auditorium door. Rob, the guy whose knee I’d prayed for, was standing on stage with a preacher. Because this service was open to the public, the room was packed. If I intended to slip in unnoticed, I didn’t know where I was supposed to sit. The preacher called my name again, asking if I was in the room. I was still standing exposed by the back door so I raised my hand and walked onto the stage.
Rob had left the morning session with just as much pain in his knee as he’d arrived with. In the afternoon, he’d gone to the gym. While lifting, he’d felt the Lord prompting him to test his knee on the exercise bike. Normally, Rob explained, he could only ride the bike for about 5 minutes before the pain became unbearable and he had to quit. But that afternoon, he’d ridden it for 45 minutes and gotten in a full workout with no pain at all.
“That just goes to show,” the preacher said, “you never know when God will cause the seeds you plant to grow. Now, I want to do something special tonight. This boy thought God hadn’t heard his prayer, but we know now that God did. If anyone here has any pain in their knee, go ahead and raise your hand. And not just their left knee, now. Any pain whatsoever in either knee, raise your hand. Don’t be shy, up high now.”
Dozens of hands shot up throughout the auditorium.
“Take a look around,” the man said. “If you’re close enough, go ahead and lay hands on someone who had the courage to raise their hand. Our boy here is going to pray from the stage that God would heal every single one of you, and we’re all going to pray with him, and when God heals you, I want you to let us know.”
He handed me the microphone, and I closed my eyes, blocking out the mass of bodies filling the room. A short prayer wasn’t an option now. I conjured up all the language I knew to describe the supernatural activity the audience anticipated God would undertake. Voices filled the room as the crowd joined in, their voices unintelligible, mine rising slightly over the hum of jumbled orisons as my prayer emerged from the speakers. I opened my eyes and looked around for the people who might acknowledge their healing. A few half-smiles on the faces of those who had been blessed. In one of the wings of the room, a man jumped up and down pointing to another man upon whom he had laid hands and who he insisted had been healed. I looked from the leaping man to the one whose pain had left his body. His eyes resigned, tired. He rested those weary eyes on mine and shrugged and nodded.
I’ve never been able to get that image out of my head. All the auditorium has faded away, and there is only the bouncing healer pointing and the man healed. He looks sad. Hollow. As though, whether he has been healed or not, he has lost something more than just the pain in his knee.