Say It Behind My Back

There I am, sealed inside a soundproof booth about the size of a phone booth, wearing headphones that make me look like a 1987 air-traffic controller, clutching a little clicker like it owes me money.

And a very kind young woman, who is approximately twelve years old, is about to discover — officially, on paper, with a graph and everything — that I am getting old.

You know the drill.

Beep. Click. Beep. Click.

Then a beep so faint you honestly can’t tell whether you heard it or just wanted to hear it — so you click anyway.

Because a man does not fail a test. Not even a hearing test. Not even one you cannot possibly study for.

But I could survive that part.

The part that got me was the clipboard.

She slid it across, real gentle, and said: “For this next portion, did you bring somebody with you? A spouse, a family member? We like to use a voice the patient is used to — someone who can stand behind you, where you can’t see their face, and say words you can’t read off their lips.”

A voice I’m used to.

Somebody to stand behind me and speak when I can’t see them coming.

And I just... sat there.

Because my wife — my Renee, my Baby Doll, the voice I’ve been falling asleep next to for longer than I’ll admit in print — is three and a half hours up the road in Houston, wrapping our whole life in bubble wrap, packing up one house so we can finally start the next chapter down here.

So I had nobody.

No familiar voice. Not one soul in that building whose sound I’d know in the dark, behind my back, with no face to read.

And I’m sitting there in those ridiculous headphones, and the Lord — who has, I want you to know, impeccable comedic timing — set a thought down in my chest that would not leave. It came, and it came, and it came again:

You can’t read My lips either, can you, John?

Well.

Let me be honest about the whole humiliating circus, because I am a vain man, and I flatly refuse to suffer in silence — which, given the subject matter, is a little on the nose.

Nobody warns you how getting old actually shows up.

It does not kick down the door. It does not blow a trumpet.

It whispers and you can’t even hear it…

You start watching mouths.

You nod at things you flat did not catch.

You laugh a half-beat late at jokes you only 40 percent heard.

You develop a deep and personal hatred for any restaurant with “ambiance,” which is the industry word for “you will not understand a single word tonight.”

And you tell yourself the lie.

The one every aging man tells, the one I have personally been running for years:

“I’m not hard of hearing. I just have selective hearing.”

Cute little fib — right up until a machine rats you out.

And then they say the two words a vain man dreads worse than “outpatient procedure”:

Hearing aids.

I sat right there doing the math on how to hide them.

Grow my hair out?

Get the invisible kind?

Just keep saying “what?” for another decade and pass it off as charm?

Because to me, getting hearing aids felt like attending vanity’s funeral.

Which — hand to God — turns out to be exactly the kind of funeral my soul has needed for a long, long time.

Because here’s what the Lord would not let me put back down once He picked it up.

You cannot read God’s lips.

He doesn’t have any.

That’s not a glitch — it’s the point.

We want a God we can lip-read.

We want Him to face us, enunciate, hold up a sign, make it obvious, on our terms, in our line of sight, where we can confirm it with our own two eyes before we risk believing a thing.

But that isn’t faith. That’s window shopping.

The Book says it flat out: Faith comes by hearing.

Not seeing. Hearing. If you’ve got to see it before you’ll trust it, you’re not walking by faith — you’re walking by sight with extra steps and a worship playlist.

But now here’s the good news, and it’s the whole reason I’m writing this down.

You can learn to recognize a voice.

You weren’t born knowing your wife’s voice.

You weren’t born knowing your mama’s.

You learned them.

You logged the hours — heard them happy, furious, scared, half-asleep, whispering in the dark — until your soul quietly filed each one under home.

And now you’d know them anywhere.

In a crowd. In the dark.

Three rooms away.

No face required.

That’s not magic. That’s just time with the voice.

And the staggering claim of this whole Book is that you can learn God’s voice the exact same way.

Jesus said it about His own sheep: “My sheep hear my voice... and they follow me. A stranger they will not follow... for they know not the voice of strangers.”

Now catch that, because I read it wrong for years.

The sheep don’t follow the shepherd because they can see him.

Sheep have terrible eyes.

In the old country, three or four flocks would water at the same well, get completely tangled together — and then each shepherd would just start talking, start walking, and his sheep, only his, would peel right out of that crowd and fall in behind him.

They couldn’t read his lips.

They didn’t check his face.

They had simply spent enough time with that voice to know it anywhere.

And you cannot fake that, and you cannot cram for it.

You can’t borrow a familiar voice you never spent any time with.

This is why you can’t microwave faith and your time with God.

God rolls with a crock-pot anyway.

You don’t get to ignore God for forty years and then pick His voice cleanly out of the noise on the worst night of your life.

The familiarity gets built in the boring hours — the quiet morning nobody saw, the prayer that felt like talking to the ceiling, the Bible you read back when it wasn’t paying off yet.

That’s the logged time.

That’s the hearing-test prep.

But here’s the part that took me the longest to learn, and it’s where I really want you to lean in.

Once you start to know the voice — you start to catch it in all kinds of places.

Because God, it turns out, is not a one-channel God.

He doesn’t only speak in a booming sky-voice or a burning bush.

More often than not, He borrows a voice you already trust.

He speaks in a register He knows you’ll actually recognize.

Sometimes God sounds like your wife — saying the one true thing you did not want to hear, in the kitchen, on a Tuesday. And you can file that under “nagging” or you can file it under “prophecy,” but you and I both know which one it usually turns out to have been.

Sometimes God sounds like your prayer partner — the friend who texts you, out of the clear blue, the exact verse, on the exact morning, before they could have possibly known what you were carrying. That is not a coincidence. That is a whisper wearing a familiar face.

Sometimes God sounds like a song on the radio — one you have heard a hundred times, except today it lands like it was written this very morning, for you, by name, and you have to pull the car over because something in your chest just buckled.

And sometimes — sneakiest of all — God sounds like a thought that comes, and comes, and comes again. The nudge that will not leave. The conviction you keep setting down that keeps climbing right back into your lap. The same quiet sentence, three mornings running, that you can’t explain and can’t shake.

(Like the one He dropped on me in that booth. You can’t read My lips either, can you. It came, and came, and came again — which is precisely how I know I didn’t make it up. The thoughts I make up have the decency to leave me alone.)

Now — somebody just got nervous, and good, you should be, a little. “Pastor, how do I know it’s God, and not just my own head, or last night’s enchiladas?”

Fair question. Here’s how the sheep tell the Shepherd from a stranger.

The voice that is really His always sounds like Jesus.

It squares with the Word — God will not whisper to you tonight something He already says is evil in writing.

It pulls you toward love, toward truth, toward the harder and better thing, never away from it.

And, like we said — it keeps coming back.

The enemy’s voice condemns you and disappears. Check that. The enemy’s voice is often on repeat as well, I just think we hit the repeat button!

God’s voice convicts you and stays, because He isn’t trying to crush you.

He’s trying to get you home.

“A stranger they will not follow.” But telling the Shepherd from the stranger takes knowing the Shepherd well enough to hear the difference. Which loops us right back around to the logged hours.

And one last thing about how He talks — the detail that nearly took my legs out in that booth.

The test was a whisper test.

Of course it was.

Because when God finally got Elijah alone — worn out, terrified, hiding in a cave, begging to die — He didn’t come in the wind. Not the earthquake. Not the fire.

He came in a still, small voice.

A low whisper you would miss completely if you were still holding out for the fireworks.

Which means the problem was never God’s volume.

It was my distance.

God rarely shouts, because He will not outscream the noise you refuse to turn down. He whispers — and a whisper does the one thing a shout never can.

It makes you lean in.

You cannot catch a whisper from the back of the room with the TV blaring.

You have to get near.

So all those years I was hollering, “God, why won’t You speak to me?” — He had been speaking the entire time.

Conversation volume. Up close. Through my wife. Through a friend. Through a song. Through a thought that would not quit.

I was just standing in the back of the room, reading lips, waiting on a billboard.

And maybe — maybe — that’s part of why the good Lord lets the ears go soft as we age. So that the man who was sure he could hear just fine on his own will finally get quiet enough, and humble enough, to say four words he’s been dodging for years:

I need some help.

Because that, in the end, is all a hearing aid really is. Not a monument to how old you got. A small, daily, slightly humiliating confession that you cannot do this part on your own anymore — and that you would rather hear the people you love than protect the lie that you’re still twenty-five.

Vanity says: I would rather miss every word than admit I need the help.

Grace says: child, put the help in your ears, and come on back to the conversation.

In a few weeks I will be learning my wife’s voice all over again in a brand-new, empty house — the echo, the boxes, the two of us hollering “WHAT?” from opposite ends of the place until the pictures are finally up on the walls. Because you learn a voice by being near it. On purpose. For years. Until you’d know it anywhere.

And that is the Voice I am not willing to lose. The ears can go — take them. But I have spent my whole life learning a Voice that has never once needed me to read His lips. He has spoken to me through Renee, through friends, through songs, through thoughts that came and came and came again. And I would trade every decibel I have left to keep on hearing Him.

You can’t read His lips.

You were never supposed to.

You were supposed to learn the Voice — and then start catching it everywhere.

So lean in. He’s not going to shout.

The Best Is Yet to Come.
Your (slightly hard-of-hearing) Hope Dealer,
Pastor John (Rookie Roberts)