Hearing Him Part One

After General Conference and all the messages about recognizing when the Lord is guiding our lives - or "Hear Him" as it's been designated - I've decided to spend some time thinking about what things I've done to help me recognize God's influence in my own life. I think that there's almost nothing as universally helpful as being able to understand when the Holy Ghost is inspiring us to do (or not to do) something. Jesus taught that life eternal is knowing God, and it seems like recognizing His inspiration is a crucial part of that.

One of the first things that comes to mind is a recommendation I received about taking notes in church meetings some time when I was a missionary. The suggestion was to make a vertical line on the notes we took: one side of the line was for notes about something the speaker said, quotations, etc., and the other side would be for impressions that I recognized to be from the Spirit. These days, I often take notes using my cellphone, so I don't draw a vertical line in the notes, but I still have a notation that I use for spiritual impressions to distinguish them from my regular notes. I'm virtually always taking notes with bullet points, so for a line that is inspiration, I simply start with '***' after the bullet point. For the size of my phone screen, this makes it really easy to find these notes when I'm looking back through later. This is helpful because these impressions often include things I'd like to write in my journal about or are things that the Lord is telling me I need to do, so I need to be able to find them easily.

Ultimately, this doesn't take much effort: I always have my smartphone with me, and before smartphones I virtually always had paper with me. For me, adopting this habit has been a minor adjustment. (I recognize that if you do not have a habit of taking notes, it's a larger adjustment, but in many cases it's not a major undertaking.) However, making even this small act of attempting to recognize when the Spirit is speaking to me and exercising the small amount of faith to identify for myself, in my private notes, the things that God is telling me has made a great difference for the years I've practiced this. It makes me think of what Alma taught his son Helaman, "that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise."

I don't remember who first taught me this idea, but I'm very grateful for it. It has helped me 'Hear Him' a bit more clearly over the years.