The Secret to Hearing from Heaven
When Lizzy was four-and-a-half, God gave her a new pair of ears. At least that’s what she told me one February morning as I spread vanilla frosting over the cupcakes we were preparing for snack time at preschool.
It’s been nearly a decade since that memorable day, but I can still picture my curly-haired girl perched on the edge of the kitchen counter, her skinny legs dangling over the ledge as she filled the drab winter’s morning with cheerful chatter. A soggy bowl of Cheerios sat abandoned on the breakfast table, poor competition for the can of frosting positioned between us.
Then, right after she’d told the tale of the naughty boy who just wouldn’t stay seated on his carpet square and had reminded me that she really needed to have a play date with her friend, Brooke; my girl exhaled a long, whistling sigh and announced, “I’m just SO GLAD I’m not four anymore,”
I turned my head from those cupcakes to see if my preschooler was joking, but my daughter’s pink lips weren’t upturned in a giddy grin. I raised an eyebrow at Lizzy’s confounding confession and reminded her that she actually was still four years old. And she would be for a while.
I set down the sticky spatula in my hand, walked to the calendar hanging next to the refrigerator, and flipped through the shiny pictures to the page marked August. I pointed to the sunny beach scene and said, “Your birthday’s in August, remember?”
Lizzy blinked as if I were speaking a foreign language.
“See?” I placed my finger on the small white square beneath the colorful beach umbrella. “Right here. August four. That’s when you’ll turn five.” I studied my girl for a glimmer of understanding, then tapped the calendar to prove my point.
Lizzy swiped her pale pink tongue across her lips in search of stray frosting drizzles and rolled her eyes. “I know when my birthday is, Mom,” she sputtered, swallowing an outburst of giggles. “I’m just really glad to finally be four-and-a-half !“
“Ohhh…..” I nodded, a bit embarrassed by my oversight. I turned away from the calendar and flashed Lizzy an apologetic smile. I reached for a washcloth to scrub the frosting-splatted countertop and tried to pick up the conversation where we’d left off. “So what makes being four-and-a-half even better than being just plain-old four?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s EASY,” Lizzy replied. “I love my new ears.”
Immediately my eyes darted from the dingy dish rag to Lizzy’s dainty ears. For a long moment, I studied those little listeners and searched for something distinct about them. I hated to deflate my girl’s enthusiasm, but as far as this mom could see, those soft peach lobes sticking out from beneath a clump of unruly hair looked like the same pair that Lizzy had been sporting since birth.
Lizzy stroked ears with her pointer finger and asked, “Don’t you just love ’em?”
“They’re beautiful,” I agreed, trying to mask my dire confusion with a wink. “When did you get the new ones?”
My girl stopped kicking the counter in a rhythmic beat and stared into space as if the answer to my question might be scribbled in the air. “I don’t know for sure when it happened,” she murmured in a slow, drawn-out-drawl. “But I think God just slipped into my room one night while I was sleeping. And He cut off my old ears and gave me these new ones.” Lizzy’s voice trailed off as she shook her head in wonderment . “I don’t know how He did it, Mom. I didn’t even bleed or anything! God must have some very special glue….”I dried off the mixing bowl and tried not to think about bloody ears or holy glue. But as we packed the cupcakes into boxes, I couldn’t help but ask my story-teller one final thing. “So how are your new ears different than your old ones?”
I expected my daughter to stumble over the question, to drop my gaze and confess that she was just spinning a silly tale. I figured that before the dishes were clean, she’d admit that the God she knew didn’t go around chopping off the ears of four-year-old girls and gluing on new ones. But instead, Lizzy looked me straight in the eyes and answered my question loud and clear.
“My new ears hear Jesus.”
I remember trying to swallow the tears that had unexpectedly collected in my throat and wondering if there was a parenting book on those dusty shelves in the next room that had a chapter titled, “What to do when your child gets new ears.” Lizzy sat there kicking the kitchen countertop in a happy beat, and I silently wrestled with a thousand different responses to my daughter’s ridiculous claim, not a single one worth saying aloud.
So began the unusual adventure of Lizzy’s new ears, the adventure of believing that Jesus was right there in my home speaking above the cry of the baby and the shuffling of little boy feet and the incessant hum of the washing machine. So began the adventure of believing that the One who spoke the world into being was speaking to my little girl as His treasured friend. Because that’s who He says that we are, of course.
The specifics of what Lizzy heard with her new ears changed changed day to day, but my daughter’s delight with her Savior did not. Nor did the childlike faith with which she received His timely words. Sometimes, those new ears detected music swelling outside of our frosty windows. “Mom! Mom! Do you hear that song? The angels are singing. It makes my heart happy…”
And, once in a while, they received instructions in sibling etiquette. “I was gonna take Hannah’s yellow blankie, but Jesus told me not to …”
And, eventually those little listeners eased my preschooler’s chronic fear of the dark. “Mommy, you don’t have to leave the hall light on anymore. When I feel scared at night, Jesus just reads me Bible stories ’til I fall back asleep.”
Needless to say, Lizzy’s four-and-a-half-year-old ears spawned quiet skepticism within her thirty-one-year-old mama. I desperately wanted to embrace the idea that God was big enough to bend low and talk to my daughter throughout the course of her ordinary days, but my grown-up practicality questioned the validity of Lizzy’s claims. I worried that my preschooler was the victim of an over-active imagination, that those ears she loved so much were just an innocent ploy to inject some excitement into our commonplace life.
However, as the snow melted beyond our windows and February’s gray gave way to May’s glory, I began to feel like the peculiar one.
Lizzy’s posture of expectancy that had spawned from those new ears seemed as natural as the bounce in her steps and the sparkle in her eyes. My little one’s desire to hear Christ’s voice while munching peanut butter sandwiches and carpooling to preschool seemed more normal than my own inattentiveness to His daily whispers. And eventually, I found myself wishing for a pair of new ears, too.
I didn’t care how God accomplished it, with holy glue or through the Holy Ghost, but I desperately wanted to be a woman who could hear His Son’s voice.
When my days felt like an endless smear of dirty dishes, dirty diapers and dirty faces, I yearned for a word that would lift my eyes above the mess. When my head taunted me with what ifs and you’ll nevers, I longed to hear truth above the clanging lies. When I lay awake in the dark of night and tried to reconcile my fears and my faith, I craved a mid-night whisper that could bring peace to my wrestling soul.
God didn’t answer my prayer with a supernatural surgery or a midday miracle. He simply used a four-and-a-half-year-old and a batch of springtime dandelions to remind me that the secret to hearing from Heaven isn’t really a secret at all. Ears that hear Jesus aren’t attached with magic glue; they’re affixed with love. Ears that hear from Heaven aren’t extraordinary. They are expectant.
One morning long after that gray day in February when my counter-top conversationalist had left me speechless, Lizzy came bounding into the kitchen with a fistful of dandelions and shoes-laced with mud. She waved the bundle of golden sprouts like a billowing flag above her tousled curls and exclaimed, “Look, Mommy! Look! Jesus said he bloomed these just for me today. Aren’t they bee–eeeee—u-tiful?
I glanced up from the stack of dirty dishes I was rinsing in the sink and gave my girl a placid smile.
But her six-year old brother set down the book he was browsing and shot her a skeptical stare. “Why does Jesus always talk to you?”
Lizzy stopped skipping and looked long at her favorite boy. She shrugged her shoulders as if the inquiry were too ludicrous to warrant an answer, but then she scrunched her eyebrows and cocked her head in that way that told me she was still thinking of a response. I held my breath as the the candid question dangled in the air. Then Lizzy hopped happily on one foot to her brother’s side, and answered him with childlike confidence, ” ‘Cuz we’re friends, and that’s just what friends do…”
She turned toward the sliding glass door and headed back out into the yard where those dandelions bloomed and the trampoline begged for some bouncy feet. But before Lizzy disappeared altogether, she glanced over her shoulder at that six-year-old in the kitchen and said, “Jesus wants to talk to you, too, ya know!”
I changed my prayer that day. I stopped begging for new ears, stopped wishing for God’s secret glue, and simply began asking Jesus to grow me into His very best friend.
Funny thing is, I ask the same thing for my kids each morning when I wake. And I pray that prayer for you every time I press the publish button and imagine you reading these humble words. ‘Cause Jesus doesn’t have a limit on friends, and we could all use a Friend who carries the world on His shoulders and knows us so well that He counts the hairs on our heads.
There’s been a change in my hearing over the last decade, but it’s not because of a secret formula. It’s because of a growing friendship.
You see, the more I get to know the One who blooms flowers for me on warm spring mornings and stirs hope in me on cold dark nights, the more I find myself listening for His voice.
When I open my Bible and remember that those age-old words are the murmurs of a Friend, I pay more attention to the verses that seem to jump off the page and lodge themselves right in my heart, the words that stir me to action, and the ones that make me face my own garbage eye to eye.
‘Cause that’s what friends do, isn’t it? We speak truth and grace, and we help each navigate the bumpy way.
Quite honestly, the more I share my heart with my Friend named Jesus, the more I expect him to share his heart with me.
And day by day, He does. Through a timely verse in my weathered Bible, through the water-color wonder of a drippy orange sunset; through tales told over a bakery counter or the giggles of my children running happy in the yard, He speaks.
And thanks to a simple lesson learned from a four-and-a-half-year-old girl who is growing up too fast, I believe that He wants to talk to you, too.
‘Cuz that’s just what friends do.
photo credit: © Can Stock Photo Inc. / lenm
I needed this very story today. Struggling to hear God in the midst of my children fighting and some new ugly tantrums, and I just really needed a glimmer of hope and a push to keep on keeping on, to pray for Jesus to be mine and my girls’ friend. I want to hear Him. Thank you for helping me.
This is my first time finding your blog, and this story nearly brought me to tears. Amazing, and I love your your daughter’s confidence in her relationship with Jesus. I so pray that she carries that with her through the rest of her life. What a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing with us, so we can be encouraged by her story, too.
Oh Alicia, this is just all kinds of beautiful…(and I just KNEW Jesus loved the dandelions!)
Such a sweet story! I’m praying for new ears for myself and all my loved ones!
Your family is so precious and your words inspiring. This is holy, beautiful and salty (making me thirsty) for deeper intimacy with Jesus. <3
I miss you! So happy to hear your voice! {That I know your beautiful voice from our time together-treasure of 2013} <3
I love how you weave words together that create pictures and stir emotion. Your stories always wrap around my heart and remind me that He is so, so close. Being here is like snuggling up with a warm blanket and having a quiet, intimate chat with a friend as we nudge each other to our Savior. Thank you for nudging me tonight. xo