Listening for God

Michelle Nott discusses a recent experience where God was communicating with her.

Do You Ever Hear God Talking to You?

There are different ways that God will communicate with us. A lot of times it is through prayer, other people like our priests, spiritual directors, the pope, or even different events in our lives. I have also heard of stories where people said they heard God talking to them by just feeling words in their hearts or heard a voice.

I have experienced several ways that God has communicated with me, and it usually depends on how good and consistent my prayer life and relationship with Him has been.

For example, there are times when it had been a while since I have been to Confession, and then I will start to have dreams that I want to go to Confession or went to Confession and was talking to a priest. There was also a time that I had been praying to God about feeling sad that our family was most likely complete, and then I felt the words, “There will be others” in my heart, and knew it was Him talking to me. I felt so much peace after that I decided to trust His timing and months later became pregnant with our sixth child, who is now 2 years old.

Most recently, God was communicating with me through the homily that our pastor gave a few weeks ago.

Learning to Accept God’s Plan

It was as if God was writing this homily for me. Our pastor began his homily by referencing the theme song from the show, Friends (“I’ll Be There for You” by the Remembrandts) and relating it to our relationship with God. This reference immediately caught my attention because I love the show Friends and knew exactly the song he was talking about.

Our pastor continued by saying how we might get frustrated with the way things in our life are going and ask God to answer certain prayers, even though what we are asking for is not His actual plan for us. But even though we are frustrated with things and our prayers not getting answered the way we want them to be, God always remains with us. (If you do not understand the reference to the song, I suggest listening to the lyrics and this will make more sense!)

While I was listening to this, I kind of got a nudging feeling that maybe this is intended for me because my son and I were at an earlier than usual Mass that morning so that we could go to a tryout for a sports team. But I cast that feeling aside until after we got the news that he, unfortunately, did not make the team.

This news was so hard for me to process because we had another moment like this a few weeks before. My son had applied for an educational opportunity at the beginning of the summer and unfortunately did not get that either. We got that news a few weeks before tryouts began, and I tried to make sense of it by thinking, “Well, maybe he didn’t get this opportunity because God knew that he would be making this sports team and would not have had time for it.”

But then we found out about the sports team results, and I became angry. This was the second time I had seen my son disappointed at a lost opportunity and start to question his abilities. It was heartbreaking. I started to ask God in prayer why He would do this to our son. Why deny him these opportunities?

Making Sense of God's Will for Us

I have tried to come up with some ways of understanding why our plans for him didn’t work out again and make sense of it all. And I’m beginning to realize that we don’t always see the big picture like God does. He sees our whole life and knows the steps we need to take to make it to Heaven with Him some day. This was clearly not part of that path for my son or our family. And sometimes we might not understand why, and I need to once again let go and place trust in God’s timing — even though we might feel disappointed or heartbroken at times.

My son is a smart and talented kid and has so many opportunities available to him. I know that God has His own plan for his life and that everything will be ok. I’ve been thinking about that homily recently and know that I was meant to hear it that day.

God always has a way of reminding us that His plan is so much better than our own.

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Copyright 2026 Michelle Nott
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