Is That You, God?

...speaking to me?

by

Practicing Faith

Special to United Methodist Insight | Aug. 15, 2026

Over the years of my career as a pastor, I have met many folks who have claimed to hear God speaking to them, or otherwise communicated with them in very direct and immediate ways. Many of these folks obviously suffer from mental disorders. But many others appeared to me to be of sound mind. So when someone tells me that God has communicated with them, I take them seriously. I don’t understand how it is that people have such experiences, I don’t have a fixed theory about what is behind them, but that does not prevent me from showing respect for the compelling vividness of their subjectivity.

At the same time, if what they believe God is telling them to do is getting in the way of their flourishing, or of the flourishing of others, I’ve got to ask if these messages might be spam.

How can you tell if that inner voice is divine or is junk mail instead? We are often advised to trust our gut, but should we trust our gut after we’ve eaten a salad of tainted lettuce? From whence can we download a spiritual spam detector?

As I look back at turning points in my life, I don’t ever recall hearing inner voices telling me what to do. Rather, I’ve had moments when circumstances have intersected in a way that gave me a powerful sense of clarity and conviction. In my senior year of college at UC Riverside, I was grappling with what I wanted to do with my life after graduation. My academic advisor was grooming me to go to the University of Chicago and get a PhD in social psychology – he had set me up with a job in a social psychology lab – a job for grad students that he got me as an undergrad. But I wasn’t convinced it was the path for me.

In the midst of this I somehow decided that I could not claim to be a truly educated person without taking calculus. I didn’t need to take it for my major, but I decided to take it anyway. I had a really good professor, and in one lecture he talked eloquently about the concept of the limit. The function gets arbitrarily close to the curve. The idea of getting arbitrarily close – that just blew my mind. The hair on my back stood up. I had gooseflesh. That is mystical spirituality, I thought – the soul in contemplation getting arbitrarily close to God, without ever being the same as God – virtually one with God, but not God.

After the lecture, as I stepped out of the classroom in a spiritual reverie, it was very clear to me that if I was having an epiphany in calculus class, clearly I belonged in a theological seminary. (All these years later I wonder why I didn’t decide then to go to grad school in math!) But I’m still sure that my decision, in that moment, was the right one. Was God speaking to me in calculus class? I didn’t experience it that way. But it was a moment of crystal clarity for me, nonetheless.

Later, when it came time for me to go through the process of ordination into the ministry of the United Church of Christ, I had to deal with the idea of “calling.” In the church world we speak of people being “called to ministry,” which implies that somebody – namely God – is doing the calling. I never experienced it as being “called.” Rather, I experienced it as a conviction.

A defining moment came while I was working as a community organizer for a consortium of churches in Hayward, California, in my last year of seminary. I loved that work. I was on the steering committee of a political campaign in Hayward for renters’ rights. One day, the head of the campaign took me aside. He was a member of the Campaign for Economic Democracy, which was led by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. He sat me down and told me that he was impressed with my abilities, and that he wanted to set me up to get trained as a CED organizer. His offer awakened me to the fact that I was at a critical juncture in my emerging career. I sat with his offer for just a short moment, and then found myself answering him without having rehearsed it. I said, “Thanks for this offer – it means a lot to me. But I believe that I can be most useful to the causes to which we are both committed by becoming a church pastor. I will be in a unique position to lead a critical constituency toward engagement for peace and justice.” His offer invoked a moment of intense clarity for me – the nearest thing I had to a sense of “calling” to ministry.

Our United Church of Christ denomination has a tag line – “God is still speaking.” I get what it means to us in the UCC: that divine revelation is progressive, that the Bible isn’t the last Word. Unfortunately, to those who aren’t part of our progressive club, the phrase has the opposite meaning. Most people in the real world outside the UCC think that “God is still speaking” means that God is still saying that homosexuality is sinful and that you’ve got to believe the Bible literally and so on. I’m hard-put to think of a more disastrous tag line for the United Church of Christ! But at least it gets us asking the question: does God speak to us at all? And if God is still speaking, how do we tell the difference between divine and profane communication?

Whenever we get what seems a message from the Beyond, whenever we get an overwhelming sense of conviction and direction, we do well to ask some questions of ourselves. Better yet, we do well to consult with trusted people, and ask for their perspectives. Is this inner message life-affirming? Does it aim toward love of others and love of self?

The Quakers have a tradition that I admire greatly. It’s called the Clearness Committee. You pick a small group of folks who are willing to serve on your committee for a short period. You send them the issue with which you are grappling, or the ”message from God” that you think you have received, ahead of meeting with them. The group chooses someone to be the “clerk” to take simple notes, which the “clerk” emails to all afterward. They start by asking you questions. Only questions. Honest, open-ended questions for which they do not yet know the answers. Questions that invite reflection. Questions that aren’t “leading” – questions that are not roundabout ways of giving advice or opinions. Questions that may inspire answers that will lead to yet more questions that will invite answers that lead to yet more questions. There are times of silence. Times for reflection, for letting questions and answers sink in deeper. When you are ready, 15 or so minutes before the agreed-upon ending time, you ask the circle to “mirror” what they heard and saw in response to their questions. Again: no opinions, no advice – just feedback about what they noticed from their time with you. Then you shake hands with everyone on the Clearness Community in silence to close the session.

Years ago I had a friend whom I loved deeply – his name was Peter. In his young adulthood he suffered from severe schizophrenia, but in time it was managed with therapy and medication. He told me that he took Jesus’s words very seriously when Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am.” So Peter always had a committee of at least three people to whom he would turn whenever, as he said, he got very excited or worked up about anything – positively or negatively. He relied on them to tell him whether or not he was going off the deep end. He asked me to be on his committee, and I was honored to say I’d serve.

We all need committees like Peter’s. We all need Clearness Committees – especially when we think we’re getting messages from God!

The Rev. Jim Burklo is pastor of United Church of Christ of Simi Valley, Calif. This post is republished from his Substack blog.