Jan and I recently talked with a couple of pastors and described how God had led our lives. The essence of what we were saying was that God had led us to the place where we now live not by our wisdom, but by the sound of His voice. We did not plan our way forward – we obeyed our way forward following the sound of God’s voice. Our guiding principle has been to say “yes” to His invitation when it did not always make sense to a rational mind.

Jan and I weren’t the smartest kids on the block, but we knew the sound of His voice. Isaiah’s words describe how we were able to forward through each season of life, “Your ears will hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it’, whenever you turn to the right or to the left” (Isaiah 30:21).

Our obedience was leading us along a path we did not see or even understand, “Your road led through the sea, your pathway through the mighty waters – a pathway no one knew was there! You led your people along that road like a flock of sheep” (Psalm 77:19-20).

Like sheep are in the natural, we were dependent on God to make way for us. We were two sheep without knowledge of which way to go except for the leading of the Lord’s voice.

Jan and I wanted the pastors to know that the ways of the Lord are not something people always discover because they have not discerned the sound of His voice. We stumbled along the way, but once we heard His voice, we knew were on the right path. In our journey of faith and our obedience to the voice of the Lord, we discovered what He had planned for us, something that we had no idea existed.

The calling of each believer is to learn to know the sound of the Lord’s voice. His voice provides the only safe direction forward when we do not know our next step. When confusion and misunderstanding roiled around in our minds, it was the direction provided by God’s voice, our Great Shepard, that brought us peace and let us know “This is the way, walk in it.”